Once Upon a Brand

I have many friends and acquaintances who praise the joys of Binge Watching television programs. The allure of watching episode after episode during the course of a ‘lost weekend’ has largely eluded me. Until now.  Five seasons of Once Upon a Time (CBS) had gone unnoticed by me, until my 15-year-old daughter asked if I wanted to watch a segment with her. I was nearly immediately hooked. Why? Bear with me. I think I figured it out.

            The first appeal, of course, is just the mind-frying task of contemplating which world to worry about first: the Storybrook, Maine of today or the Fairy Tale Kingdom we all grew up with. Each is equally familiar – and equally strange. The plot jumps back and forth between an archetypal Maine woods version of Now and an elucidation of enchanted Then. The residents of Storybrook (at least initially) don’t remember their former selves (Snow White, Prince Charming, Rumplestiltskin, Jimminy Cricket, Little Red Riding Hood), but somehow know enough to live in constant dread of the ‘mayor,’ the Evil Queen. The show’s operating psychology is of people somehow trapped in a series of relationships predicated on past pains and blessings they no longer recall. Welcome to our World.

            My daughter began the fun by trying to figure out which Fairy Tale characters the friends who populate our lives are in this alternate universe. (She, Princess Charmingly enough, thinks I’m Snow White.) Very quickly we began spotting strangers on the street we could sort into the appropriate archetype: the Grannies, the Hansels & Gretels, the Sleeping Beauties. You get the drift.

            I began thinking about the Brand archetypes: I’ve done a bit of this in various categories, so it was a natural evolution of my viewing pleasure, I suppose.

·      The Evil Queen toggles between trying to be a real leader of the town/land and the misuse of her powers, ultimately (and eternally, it would seem) attacking an innocent Snow White. Isn’t that what pharmaceuticals play in our commercial landscape? Tremendous power (an apple a day) corrupted in the wrong hands, or at least with debilitating side effects?

·      Rumplestiltskin spins straw into gold. Isn’t that the world of Big Food, as we know it? As he continues to remind us in the show: All magic comes with a price.

·      Jimminy Cricket is the voice of conscious. I’m thinking that’s the ‘better for me and/or better for the environment and/or better for my kids’ voice we all hear and to which we (like Pinocchio) may or may not consistently adhere.

·      Sleeping Beauty is an entire cadre of Brands that were once wonderful and have now simply ‘fallen asleep,’ because we can’t figure out how to wake their promise.

·      Little Red Riding Hood brands are the ones that masquerade as appealing, even sophisticated, but are actually born to destroy: waistlines, lungs, driving records. Want fries with that? Got a light? One for the road? 

            Carl Jung and Brunno Bettleheim, among many others, have certainly mined the power and uses of archetype and fairytale enchantment in people. I’m now wondering if there's an equivalent lens we can use to break out of the rut of Then behaviors as we attempt to surface the essential promise ‘for good’ of the Brands we steward Now. What are the myths we follow without realizing? What can ‘happily ever after' mean for Brands? 

What Do These Three Brands Have in Common?

Perhaps I'm the only one still watching broadcast cable with its remarkably fascinating (to me) collections of marketing messaging. Every once in a while, the messages seem to coalesce, probably because all the agencies are doing equivalent research and therefore finding comparable 'white space.' Lately, the stars have so aligned around brands that provide an arguably silly level of consumer confidence to fight a certain type of Evil.

• The first one I noticed as particularly strange was the fellow feeding raw steak to lions, presumably because he got genuine Ford auto parts, though I'm not sure I would have made that connection without the voice over.
• Next up: The fellow emboldened by his Kermit-esque roommate (?) to apply for a mortgage from his kitchen table, wearing only boxer shorts. The puppet gets it right: Awkward.
• Then, there are the folks who get their 'credit swagger' on because they've used the right credit reporting service: Does anyone else worry about the lack of civility in negotiating for and winning the potted plant the car salesman's wife gave him? Power corrupting absolutely? 

The promise that the ads surface:  Confidence is what we need. Especially a certain kind of confidence that enables us to triumph over the Axis of Evil formed at the intersection of auto repair shops, banks and car dealerships. That's what intrigues me. Look at the enemies we're fighting with the help of these brands.

What also intrigues me: These villains we love to hate are conquered by loopy 'heros' with the help of MIA brands we never quite glimpse anything more of than their logos.

Could the truth of the lumbering consumer confidence number reported on the business pages lurk here? We haven't lost confidence in our economy, but in ourselves. We've decided to pick only small battles, ready to take up (Branded) arms against the callow bank manager in the branch down the road or sit in our underwear with a puppet on the couch? 

Here's to articles in The Times we can't quite forget...

A May 8 article in The New York Times is a tremendous example of ‘repurposing’ a Brand for an evolving market. The article reports on The Ziegfeld Club (on the fifth floor of a Presbyterian Church on East 64th Street!), the last vestige of that once legendary entertainment juggernaut. Founded by Billie Burke, Ziegfeld's widow, its purpose was "to help support Ziegfeld Girls who had fallen on hard times." Many, perhaps most, had. But, the last one died in 2010 at age 106. So what to do?

How many meetings have we all been in where the brief explains, "We lose another consumer every time a hearse goes by, but we're not replacing them." The Ziegfeld Club is the poster child of that woe. Or it would have been if the stewards of the Club hadn't decided to reinterpret the mission: Help actresses at the ends of their careers, yes, of course.  But also help them as they launch their professional lives. Do both and up the ante some more: Fight sexism in the theatre. Whoosh! We can see how they got there from impoverished, aging Ziegfeld girls, but doesn't it seem wonderfully 'now.' 

How to deliver? Reinvigorate the Brand with equal parts heritage and contemporary relevance. The Ziegfeld DNA was honored by hosting the event at the New Amsterdam Theatre -- home to the Ziegfeld Follies from 1907 to 1927 -- while featuring classic show tunes and actresses in the authentic costumes of 'Flo's girls.'

Point 1:
Acknowledge and restate the root stock, charmingly.

Point 2: Bring it powerfully forward by asking Jeanine Tesoir (composer of "Fun Home," the hottest ticket of this year) to be the keynote. Who better to articulate the vision of the newly re-imagined Club? 

Point 3:
Find a point on the near horizon to work towards: The club's 80th birthday next April will build the emotional, cultural and social relevance of a once dusty Brand into a Broadway lightening rod. 

Well done.  

The Achilles Heel of Strong Brands: People

When I first came to New York City to live, the Village Voice was my weekly Bible reading. The publication had a recurring cartoon feature I quite adored. It carried a promise: "All dialogue guaranteed verbatim."  This posting comes to you with the same promise.

The other night I was flying home on the incredibly glamorous 'red-eye' from Los Angeles. I was seated in First Class, phew. Still, we boarded the United Flight at 9 p.m. and were due to land at 5 a.m. The mission for me and all of my seat mates was the same: Get to sleep, stay asleep. There was one loud, penetrating voice, however. I couldn't really believe that anyone on that flight would keep talking through the night, but there you have it. There was one. I fell asleep to his drone. I couldn't make out the words, just the fact that there was a monologue in progress.

The cabin lights came on at 4:30 and I came to to the sound of the same voice:  "So I told her, I want hard wood, not memory foam, you know want I mean?" It was the steward, talking to his female colleague about his wife's body, post-baby. Eeck! The female flight attendant looked at me, looked away, didn't really know where to look. The steward went on and on. Complaining about his wife's refusal to work out as diligently as he wanted her to. Comparing her to other women he'd slept with, other women who had also had babies. It was overwhelmingly inappropriate and as I left the plane, I found myself promising myself not to book United again. Which put me in a frame of mind in the cab ride home of debating whether or not that's fair. Do I count this as poor training on United's part. Bad hiring? No genuine supervision? Or just the ravings of one lunkhead? Perhaps the fault is mine: I should have done more than glower as I exited the aircraft?

But then I considered all the Brand experiences I'd had at apparel chains, 'brand name' restaurants and hotels and how one person can make the absolute difference. Such an amazing vulnerability. One guy upset with his wife changes my perception of an airline with which I've logged millions of miles. And, one whose advertising and reliance on Gershwin I've quite adored. Heads-up Brand ambassadors. And, Brand stewards. 

Let's File This Under: Campaigns I Wish I Could See the PowerPoint of...

So, NBC, Walgreens and a bunch of (Walgreensesque) brands are hyping the notion that ending poverty can be done if enough people buy $1 red noses at Walgreens, take pictures of themselves and others wearing said red noses, and then watch a comedy show on NBC. Gosh! All good fun and all in the name of helping end poverty in the US and around the world. Please, please: Help us understand the logic, beyond the blatant self-promotion for NBC, Walgreens and its candy brands, free traffic-building loopyness for Walgreens and the gosh-aren't-I-a-cool-celebrity, watch me! watch me! factor.

What's funny exactly about poverty? What got them to say, I know! I know! It's a tough subject nobody really wants to address. Let's tart it up a bit. Let's sell red noses! It's be like that ice cube thing last year, but less painful. I understand the notion started in the UK, but still. Really, people? Show me the PowerPoint. Or, just show me the Point. 

We have only to watch the images out of Baltimore's Sandtown to understand the issue isn't that "poverty needs is a good laugh," or a media-based repositioning, but rather that we need to roll up our sleeves and actually do something specific, something that isn't exactly fun or funny, something, dare I say it, that costs more than a buck and requires more of us than a feel-good-about-myself Instagram moment. The outsourcing of our moral responsibilities may play to our consumer and self-aggrandizing culture, but at what cost to our genuine cultural connectednes. 

That's what I think. What say you?

Question for you, Larry Merlo (CVS), and you, Mike Parker (NIKE), and you, dear reader...

It’s impossible to watch the news and remain unaware of the bifurcation of our consumer society: Mass media ensure we all crave the same things; income inequality ensures we don’t have equal access. Baltimore’s protest of police treatment of a young Black man is one aspect of a scale that isn’t fairly balanced. The turning of that protest into vandalism of a CVS and a shoe store (among others) is another. We whose job it is to create demand, even craving, even lust for stuff need to ask ourselves which side of the scale is our thumb on?

    My modest proposals:

• First of all, CVS, rebuild, right there. Bring that store back to life as an act of faith in that neighborhood.

• Second: Nike, Adidas and others athletic shoe makers: Invest in that small, family-owned shoe store. Help breath new life – and employment – into those streets.

• The rest of us: Commit to hiring an inner-city intern this summer. Call the public high school in a tough neighborhood near you. Do it today.

Our purpose in life isn’t solely to ensure shareholder value and market share, after all. We can create social value and safeguard a dynamic, growing consumer culture that doesn’t fuel division, but rather celebrates shared joys.

Scared by Food, Seeking Elegant Meals with a Side of Safety

My email and snail mail boxes have been have been chockablock with food news. First all the negative headlines: Listeria affecting everything from sprouts to ice creams, then bird flu moving from ducks in the Northwest to chickens in Iowa, then the coverage of the glacial pace of the FDA's implementation of food safety modernization standards. But then, comes some very different alerts:

• There's Kitchensurfing.com (I wrote about in an earlier blog), which brings a chef and food to your door to prepare dinner for $25 a person
• A service called Munchery.com, which delivering fresh, nourishing, seasonal, chef-prepared (and! microwavable dinners) to your home daily, on-demand
• And, my own personal favorite, news from the 21 Club that it can now deliver any of its menu items via a service called Caviar! The food is great, but I'm pretty sure I'd miss that dining room with all the toy corporate vehicles suspended from the ceiling

So are we hungering for elegance in our food safety? Or ignoring the worries by outsourcing the selection of ingredients in favor of the Voila! of a curated dining experience?

Home delivery of absolutely everything is on the near horizon. I wonder if there's more than fear of our food supply and a profound desire to be taking care of? Perhaps the more we are able to work, play, study and engage the culture from a secure home base, the less we want to venture out. Call it a hunkering down in the bunker mentality, but it's scary out there. 

Home Delivery of Everything -- Including Viagra -- Is Here

When I saw the first ad from Pfizer offering direct delivery of Viagra (fulfilled through CVS, but still), I knew retail as we know it was over. The conventional wisdom is about to be toast: Women go to drug stores to get the family prescriptions fulfilled and while the pharmacist does his work, she goes into the cosmetics and hair care aisles to shop for herself. Poof! Nurturing and self-indulgence under one roof. Pfizer led with Viagra and has added other drugs during the past year. Tick tock, tick tock. It's only a matter of time before all Brand name drugs arrive via the United States Postal Service (Going to virtually every address in the country, virtually everyday, what else can they deliver? Don't get me started!), probably improving compliance, definitely offsetting the power of generics and upending the rationale for all those drug stores on every block. Walgreen's, CVS, RiteAid:  Are you paying attention? Radio Shack isn't the only retailer that needs to go through a footprint contraction. 

How about the Rx companies with strong OTC and personal care businesses? Made total sense for a long time, since aspirin, shampoo, suntan lotion, band-aids and vitamins were all on the same list as our 'scripts. But remove the Rx from the store and how do those portfolios look? 

The Rx drug makers win by getting to know their patients personally. After all, they are being invited into the home directly. But my worry is for the OTC brands. If they maintain their reliance on mass media to set the stage and their channel partners to know the consumer while continuing to rearrange the shelf sets, relying on FSIs to move goods, they will surely find they have given a party to which no one comes. 

The New Affluence, A Post-Modern Moment

Over dinner the other night, a friend told me about a new company he's helping: It's called KitchenSurfing. For $25 per person, a chef comes to your home, brings the ingredients for one of three meals you've selected, cooks, serves and cleans up. Wow. Arthur Clarke famously wrote that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and I believe KitchenSurfing meets his criteria. Ditto FreshDirect. Ditto Uber.

What these magic tricks put me in mind of is how technology brings the markers of genuine affluence -- personal chefs, farm to table ingredients and chauffeurs on call -- to the 99 percent. I remember as a kid hearing Grandmother and Grandfather stories of homes with outhouses, reminiscences of family members huddling by radios to hear the news of the day, or the long-running narrative arc of the first soap operas.  These one-generation removed memories spoke of times when gas stoves, ice boxes and hot and cold running water were the remarkable niceties that conferred status in small town America. My thought at age 12 or so was that soon everyone, no matter how much money they had or didn't have, would be living a remarkably advanced, upper middle class life, as judged by the looming universality of conveniences I already took for granted: Television, telephones, heat and air-conditioning. Technology is kicking that up a notch in this iteration of the mass upscaling of the culture. So we may decry an era when kids won't make as much money as their parents did, but if they have a chef and a chauffeur, hmmm. 

Curious and Curiouser about Amazon

I've always been entranced by Amazon's early decisions: Why digitally remaster the one shopping experience we all arguably enjoyed -- bookstores -- first? The ones crying out for reinvention, like Grocery, Mass and Mall, came later. Once we had Prime, there was simply no going back. Now there's Dash with it's 'never run out' functionality, coming in on little cat feet but bound to unend Brand loyalty as we've understood it. Once I have a Tide Pod button on my washer, what can All or A&H or Walmart do to disrupt? Not much. And this is, of course, just the beginning. An even more fascinating new offer hit my email inbox this week: Amazon's version of Angie's List, offering me access to plumbers, cleaning help, housekeepers, and, fascinatingly, caregivers and tutors. Amazon is arguably our generation's Walmart, changing the rules wherever it plays. That is with one so far insignificant difference: In its desire to make a difference it hasn't felt honor bound to make a profit. But hey! It's hard and expensive work to improve the universe. I'm a fan. 

What is Walmart Up To Now?

Most of what I'm reading seems to suggest this is a way for the retail category killing giant Walmart to gain leverage on the detergent category dominating giant Procter & Gamble. Known for its unrelenting focus on low price and lower price and lowest prices, Walmart seems to be acting counterintuitively by bringing in a premium priced detergent from Europe and stocking it next to Tide. One motivation may well be to put price pressure on P&G. But perhaps not so much. What if it signals a strategy shift for Walmart? Trying to be the source for new, cool products consumers can only find there. Walmart, pulling a Target? Tide we can find anywhere and even 'subscribe' to on Amazon. But Persil? Not so much. Or are we looking through the wrong end of the telescope? Is it actually Persil-maker Henkel's strategy to gain a toehold in the lucrative US market -- one they didn't get when they bought Dial. 

IS A GENUINE CONSUMER FOCUS BEGINNING TO PENETRATE BIG FOOD?

I admit it's coming slowly, but surely as Spring will ultimately arrive in New York, there seems to be something of a renaissance of genuine consumer focused thinking. We all know we're beginning to think differently about food and what goes into it and what is done to it. Suddenly, perhaps as suddenly as an iceberg emerges off the starboard bow, Big Food seems to be doing 'business as usual' in a fresh way too. McD's chicken move is followed by Burger King's emancipation from its soda set point is followed by Quaker Oats steel cut varietals. Where will this end? Perhaps it won't. 

Certainly it was difficult to change the course of the Titanic. Impossible, as it turned out.  Perhaps it will prove just a bit easier to move Big Food product innovation and marketing. Perhaps not. But it must be done or else what sounds now like a happily-go-lucky 30-second spot will reveal itself to be the charming ship's orchestra fiddling to keep morale up while others fight over space in the life boats, otherwise known shrinking shelf space and same store comps. The alternative is the Brands we grew up with will plow straight on, becoming at once a nostalgic nod to earlier ignorance (quaint as a scene of a pregnant woman in a bar with a martini and a Camel, a la Mad Men) and a cautionary tale of hubris and despicable Brand stewardship.

THE SOCIAL POWER OF McBRANDS

The news from McDonald's today that it is moving towards an antibiotic-free chicken nugget future is thrilling. Let's just say it. This one 'reset' may not change the fortunes of the McDonald's brand in the short-term, okay. But, it does, in one deft move, illustrate the social power of Brands to up the ante throughout the supply chain and take a powerful message straight to consumers. Sure, as the change phases in, we all may well lower our shoulders a bit when crossing the threshold of this fast food temple. Perhaps. But we'll also look twice in the poultry section of the grocery case and so will Mr. Grocer. McD's competitive set will have to match the move and whoosh! Chickens without weird additives. Watch the dominos start to fall, as well, as Big Food notes the euphoria and begins to make their own steps to rid their Brands of additives, preservatives and all manner of bizarre, unpronounceable ingredients.  

That noise you hear in the background? Chickens chirping "Huzzah!" I'm quite 'loving it' suddenly, too. 

BEYOND BRAND ADVOCACY...PASSION CUTS BOTH WAYS

We hear so much about the power of Brand advocacy and influencers. And that is justifiable. They certainly drive Brand meaning into our culture. Passion Branding is a huge opportunity. But, recently, I've been wondering if we think enough about the dark side of passion in our Branding. What happens when we disappoint or dismay? Sometimes it happens when we're part of a category that elicits derision, liked sugared sodas right now. Or, because we're BIG FOOD, swimming against the tide of joyous local. Those are huge issues, needing huge solutions. What I'm thinking about is of a smaller scale: When we take actions that seriously compromise our Brand's value in the minds of just a few consumers? We seem to be able to ignite Brand destructive behaviors I'm coming to think of a Brand Terrorism. Not the legions of 'antis' that have triggered countless marketing campaigns for categories and industries. No, just the lone wolf who now can release Brand mayhem through social media. Are we taking our consumer comments seriously, working night and day to make it right for the one, so we don't enable negatives to spread and infect the many?

SLOUCHING TOWARDS AN ALMOST FULL EMPLOYMENT ECONOMY?

The news out of Bentonville is huge, I think. If Walmart acknowledges it needs to up the salary ante, then can the rest of the minimum wage world be far behind? This is exciting news. It doesn't come near to getting those workers up to the high bar of Costco ($20 per hour to start, but it should signal McDonald's that the stakes are getting higher to attract decent talent. And you don't have to be a Nobel Prize winning economist to consider the potential impact of more money in more peoples' wallets at the low end of the wage spectrum. Coupled with seemingly gravity-fed gas prices, we may be on the cusp of a trickle up spiral. 

TRUTH WILL OUT? OR NOT?

I had a fascinating conversation the other day with a fellow I quite enjoy. There's a 'but' in this syntax, of course. We were talking about a speech I had just given and while he was quite high on the content and the potential for impact, he warned me that when I give it again, if there are retailers in the crowd, not to speak so blatantly of the looming death of retail...."the slow motion erosion of retail." His advice poses one of those quandaries that physicians must face all the time: Do you tell patients the truth or provide a calming, soothing presence to manage their inevitable decline? Hmm. 

WHAT I'M WONDERING ABOUT TODAY...

The K-E-Double L, Oh-Double Good (that's Kellogg's to the rest of us) new campaign extolls the joys of Kellogg's cereals for breakfast, for sure. But there's so much romance in the photography and poetry in the copy (and doesn't somebody in Battle Creek wish that Annie had been more of a hit this year?), that it makes me wonder if maybe, just perhaps this campaign is to assuage the pent up anguish of their retail partners. Isn't it really a category campaign, designed to 'lift all boats,' because folks are not rolling their carts down the cereal aisles? Such are the joys of category captaincy. As my geometry teacher used to write on my tests: Good try. Difficult subject. 

- What do you think?