Branding and Marketing
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Health Care On the Back of a Napkin
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Media, Brand Exposure and Pre-Requisite Sustainability
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Punishing Short Term Exploitation
Branding, Social Media, and Learning to Lose Control
Published September 10, 2009 @ 02:49PM PT
One of the defining realities of modern life is the surfeit of choices we experience. Every time we want to buy something, every time we want to experience something, there are usually more choices than we can accommodate. The importance of brand has risen as people search for good ways to differentiate products and experiences. Today I gave a presentation at the Hub Berkeley about brand, social media, and losing control.
The presentation came out of a lot of what I've been thinking and writing about lately. The conversation about social media is too often ghettoized to the details of things like how to get more followers on Twitter. I think though that the real power of social media is the way in which it is challenging not just company's brands, but the very way brand is established and transmitted.
Some key points of the presentation included:
- The notion that brand is about the feelings people associate with a company, organization, idea, or person, or to use Zefrank's language, the "emotional aftertaste."
- Brand matters more than ever because of the increase in consumer choice and the fracturing of distribution platforms
- The internet changes the experience of brands and gives individuals more power to remix messages, spread things they like, connect with other critics of things they don't and generally take control of brands
- Nonprofits have to create specific value for their stakeholders to engage with for them to successfully differentiate themselves from other mission-driven organizations
See the full presentation here:
And take a few minutes to watch Zefrank on branding as well:
(Photo: Liako)
Stories Truer Than The Truth: The Brand of Social Entrepreneurship
Published July 01, 2009 @ 04:27PM PT
What is truer than the truth? The story.
So began Isabel Allende at her TED Talk in 2007. Paraphrasing the Jewish proverb, she was saying that the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives often reveal as much about us as any facts ever could.
This has always been clearest to me in music. The early American folk ballads that were adapted from the Old World and which would become the root of country and popular music almost invariably had dueling escapism and morality. They told stories of abberational (and unacceptable) behavior that, in their telling, made people feel liberated, if only for a brief few minutes. For every action though there was a consequence, reinforcing not only the dominant morality but the strict structure that allowed social groups to survive the brutality of early colonial life.
A great example is "The House Carpenter," a famous folk ballad (originally British) that has been peformed by everyone from Natalie Merchant to Bob Dylan. In the song, a long-lost lover returns to a woman who has settled with her carpenter husband and new baby and entices her to run off to sea with her, leaving her family behind. What seems like a grand adventure quickly turns sour. The woman becomes despondent, weeping for her child left behind. As she drowns metaphorically in her sour, the ship springs a leak and literally sings, ending her life.
In it's particular combination of escapism and morality, "The House Carpenter" reveals a huge amount about the mores of Appalacian society in the 18th century where the contemporary form of the song was popularized.
But stories are not just codified in contemporary culture; they are often explicitly created to generate a particular response. This is, of course, what we call branding. Brand's help people form an emotional connection with something, and can often quite literally change people's perception of a thing. I recently heard a great story that reinforced this point.
The cousin of a friend of mine was traveling with the Grateful Dead a couple of decades ago. Having run out of money to buy tickets to the shows, he began tie dying and selling t-shirts outside of each new arena. By mistake, however, he had only purchased XXL t-shirts to sell. For a few shows, he was completely unsuccessful. But then it doned on him to call them "Jerry-sized," connecting them with the portly and beloved Dead frontman Jerry Garcia, and quickly sold out.
This all matters for this blog because we are in the midst of major branding shifts. Of course many are trying to better calibrate the brands of their organizations with the value they're creating - from the social impact on whatever issue they're working on to the experience for staffers and volunteers involved.
Perhaps even more importantly, however, we have a branding opening in the social enterprise space. Just what to call this is still up for grabs: social enterprise? Social entrepreneurship? Blended Value Social Capital Markets for Good?
We converse about definitions, but perhaps more time should be spent on brand implications. What if capitalism just was social enteprise? What if we rejected the fracturing of social, environmental, and financial value? What if we said that the real abberation were corporations that didn't care about all of their impact? What if we said that every person should be viewed as someone with talents to cultivate, grow, and direct? What if we said that every resource should be stewarded rather than exploited? And what if we build structures to reinforce that?
Those are the real implications for the branding of our movement. I'm thrilled to see groups like BeDo, Endeavor, Acumen Fund, and the Social Capital Markets folks who are telling that story, but I want to see it biggified. I want to tell the story of how individual entrepreneurs fit into larger ecosystems. I want to tell the story of where we want to go, not where we are. I want self-fulfilling prophecy of a better, more just, smarter, more sustainable system.
That's the story we must make truer than the truth.
Humanitarian Marketing's Dangerous Race to the Bottom
Published June 06, 2009 @ 11:05AM PT
The world's worst humanitarian crisis? (photo credit: New York Times)
Somalia is the world's worst humanitarian crisis, according to a warning issued by Oxfam this week. The statement prompted a Time article "Somalia's Crisis: Not Piracy, but Its People's Plight" that is now making it's way around Twitter. The designation of "worst," while good for flashy magazine headlines and NGO press releases, is part of a dangerous race to the bottom in the marketing of global humanitarian plight that has inadvertently sapped political relevance.
The first time I went to Uganda was in August 2005, a little less than a year after then head of UN humanitarian affairs Jan Egelend called it the "biggest neglected humanitarian crisis" in the world. As one of my earliest up close interactions with the global humanitarian system, it was fascinating and strange to see how international nongovernmental organizations wielded that designation like a trophy or talisman. As I researched international aid in northern Uganda's internal displacement camps, versions of Egelend's quote came up more often than just about any other statistic or sound byte.
This is understandable and deeply human. Superlatives exist in language to help us differentiate magnitude, excellence and severity. And in a world in which so many global challenges vie for media attention and donor dollars, it is understandable that the aid community grabs onto external forces that validates the atrocity of the particular injustice they seek to address and that can lead new allies and stakeholders in their direction.
But I have come to believe that this clinging to designations of superlative horror is the one of the most corrosive and dangerous forces in marketing and media around humanitarian crises. I believe that by propagating these sort of statements, aid agencies have accidentally become complicit in inspiring apathy in the broader public.
Superlatives like "worst," and "most neglected" put the emphasis of our attention not on the horror of injustice, but on the singularity of a particular instance of injustice. While this may prove a temporarily galvanizing force, what it leads to is a shortness of attention and a race of resources to the next new worst crisis. Aid worker after aid worker in Uganda in 2005 talked about having been stationed in one location, getting half way through a project, and then having resources immediately vacate as some new crisis (the big disruptive force then was the Tsunami) grabs more attention.
Now it's a fair question to ask how much of this problem is the endless cable news media cycle vs. the aid agencies themselves. It's also at least reasonable (if I think wrong) to ponder whether humanitarian aid policy should be driven by trying to ease the worst of the worst situations. But I still believe that the quickness with which we the social change community latch on to superlatives is a fundamental problem. It is, to be ironic, perhaps the "greatest" branding and marketing challenge we face.
Your Brand is an Invitation
Published May 12, 2009 @ 07:22AM PT
Fake Brands in Nanjing China (via Flickr)
The social sector sucks at branding.
In much of the nonprofit sector, the concept of "brand" has been poisoned by anti-globalization advocates who conflate conspicuous consumption, reckless and exploitative business behavior, and lemming like devotion to particular brand identities with the idea of brand itself. While much of this "No Logo" style critique is vital, what's always frustrated me is the misdiagnosis of branding (rather than the exploitation of brand power) as the problem. Brand-washing - where a brand is used to cover up nastiness behind it is a problem; brand itself is an opportunity. And as we write away branding as ancillary to the mission rather than the core means of building a community of believers, we lose that opportunity.
A brand is about more than the logo. Brand is about how to distill complex concepts into associational chunks, and share with the world in the simplest terms the core of what we care about. Your organization's brand is its DNA, a combination of description and inspiration that helps people identify your company or nonprofit as a fellow traveler.
The social sector should totally kick ass at branding.
The social sector has an incredible story to tell. In some way or form, every organization is imbued with a passion for a more equitable, just world. Every organization has programmed into its core the idea that the world can be a better place, and that problems created by people can also be fixed by people.
We live in a moment where people want that message. We want to believe in ourselves, and moreover, we want to believe in a more complex conception of ourselves. Big box brands and botique brands aren't going away, but in a world of such turmoil and instability, brands that make us feel anchored in values and connected to something bigger than ourselves are immensely important, and have the potential to keep the flame of entrepreneurship and justice alive in tough times.
It's right to recognize that brands cannot in themselves create quality. But they can create a pathway for new people to be inspired by and contribute to quality, and it's worth carving out just a little bit more time and space in our organizations for translating the values we hold and the impact we make into a brand that invites new people to be a part of changing the world.
