PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

It’s summer, I’m told, and this year we packed up the dogs as well as my sister and her son (my brother-in-law was in waiting for my niece’s arrival back from doing the Silk Road thing in China), and headed for Inverness, Nova Scotia. The beach there is pretty swell, but you have to be willing to drive 14 hours from Boston to get to it.

I was determined to do a bit of beach reading, and after finding even a pop psychology book on happiness too demanding to compete with the waves and sun, I turned to the latest Vanity Fair. After the first 168 pages of ads, the editorial lurched into view. There was a wonderful story on Rudy’s new wife called “Terror Alert,” and then, right at the opening of a big puff piece on Brazil, a short essay from A.A. Gill. Only 500 words or so, but some of the best non-fiction I’ve read all year. Right there, in the middle of Gisele Bündchen’s cleavage, was a brilliant distillation of the BRIC countries: (more…)

Behavioral banner advertising is all the rage. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and bloggers everywhere have cottoned on to it, and clearly the US Federal Trade Commission is interested. If the federal government takes notice, you know we’ve crossed the chasm.

I can’t help thinking, though, about a piece I ghost-wrote two years ago for a pharmaceutical chemist, who decried the trend toward putting all scientific exploration into a niche and discouraging forays into fields outside one’s specific therapeutic area. The memory of writing that article makes me wonder: Whatever happened to Renaissance Men and Women who branched out and weren’t defined purely on the basis of their clickpaths? Several years down the road, Amazon’s “Customers who bought this item also bought” function continues to elicit a shrug from me. Once in perhaps 1,000 times I see something of interest. Everything else is based on a generic picture of who I am. If you looked at my book or music collection you’d wonder whether I was hopelessly schizophrenic instead of interested in everything. Except NASCAR.

In the end, I suppose the net is that behavioral ads will win the day, thousands of coders in China will design hundreds of versions of the same message for 50 cents an hour, online vendors will sell more long-tail page placements (the equivalent of 4:15 AM Sunday air time), and companies will profit from the fragmentation. To look at what else in the world might inspire us beyond our click paths, we’ll just have to take it offline.

Although I try not to bring politics to the workplace (it’s still a bit too volatile, even in Cambridge), I thought Frank Rich had an interesting point about Karl Rove’s resignation in yesterday’s New York Times.

The piece, entitled He Got Out While the Getting Was Good, notes that Rove’s style — tightly controlled, top-down messages that are centrally managed — effective as it was in 2002, is hopelessly out of date in 2007, with the rise of You Tube and other social media outlets.

To quote Rich, “A year [after George Allen’s ‘macaca’ incident], leading Republicans are still clueless and panicked about this new medium, which is why they, unlike their Democratic counterparts, pulled out of even a tightly controlled CNN-YouTube debate. It took smart young conservative bloggers like a former Republican National Committee operative, Patrick Ruffini, to shame them into reinstating the debate for November, lest the entire G.O.P. field look as pathetically out of touch as it is.”

Whatever you think about Rich or Rove, what’s interesting is how quickly web journalists and content distribution have upended the age-old centrism and control structure in a government. The same is increasingly true for corporations. If you think you can control your message from above in an age of social media, you, too, may soon be announcing that you’re leaving your post to spend more time with your children.

We’re having an interesting summer (clearly, we’ve been a bit busy based on the evidence of this blog). One of our projects has been to help a B2B company transform itself into a consumer brand. A fool’s errand, you say? A marketing whitewash? In this case, perhaps not. Check out a terrific article from Biotech 360, whose title says it all: “What can the biotech industry learn from a consumer products giant? More than you might suspect.”

The article outlines how P&G, under the leadership of CEO A.G. Lafley, has brought the company from strength to strength in observing, recording, co-developing, testing, and following its customers everywhere, including into their minds. In short, consumer-driven innovation. In one of the best anecdotes, P&G Pharmaceuticals staff wore pagers to interrupt their daily lives 6 to 12 times a day to simulate the effects of having acute ulcerative colitis. If they were driving and got the page, for example, they had to find the nearest public bathroom. What a great way to create empathy with a target audience. The insights gained led P&G to improve its support programs and guided clinical research.

What’s so interesting about this approach is that one of our B2B clients is similarly cultish about their customers. They observe them in their work spaces. They have 165 technical specialists whose job is to do nothing but solve problems and report back insights in real time. They hire industrial design firms to add useful innovation to commodity product spaces. And yet surveys show they are often thought of on the same level as industrial distributors, coopetition in short. Clearly, the message about how they approach their customers looking for innovation opportunities is not getting through.

Which is where their agency comes in. How do you convey a customer-driven company without hanging out internal laundry? Why should the customer care? Are a customer focus and unending determination the stuff of great marketing? At the moment, we’re moving from insights to creative treatments. Should be an interesting next couple of months…