PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

I was in New York recently listening to some focus groups on enterprise security. The people on the other side of the glass oversaw the safety of tens or hundreds of thousands of employees. They were smart and articulate (and God bless them, they also liked our creative). When we came to the channel survey portion of each group, it was striking how many subjects enthusiastically supported the idea of a one-minute video or even a one-minute podcast as a call to action.

“Sure,” one of the more cranky executives said, “I’d give a minute of my time to hear more.” (more…)

This intriguing question comes via a media colleague, who found it in a Columbia Business School ad.

Clearly, we will be building mass brands and niche brands in the future, but what sort, with what tools and with what kind of partners?

I thought Kevin Maney’s perspective on this question was pretty interesting in his new Portfolio piece, “Free for All.”

When you look at the tectonic shifts in the music industry that have taken place since 1999, those days of paying $9.99 for a new B-52s album and $28 for a ticket to see them live seem like 200 years ago. For example:

* Radiohead lets the user choose the price for In Rainbows

* Nine Inch Nails releases its latest album only to its Web site (though, like Radiohead, you could pay a huge premium for a deluxe edition, both of which have sold out)

* Timbaland has cut an exclusive music deal with Verizon Wireless

* 99% of all downloaded music in China is illegal, and 85% of all CDs sold are pirated

* Concert revenue is surging ($3.9 billion in 2007), CD sales are cratering. If you’ve purchased a concert ticket lately, you know that all too well.

So what may be coming?

* All musical content becomes free, with a mass brand paying seven figures to give the CD away free with its identity and messaging associated with it. (Or to quote Maney, “Any day now, I expect to find a flash drive with a Radiohead song on it inside a specially marked box of Cap’n Crunch.”)

* Groups make money only from sponsorship and touring, using their music as the content play. (Since when did anyone ever pay for a music video, or a CIO for a white paper?)

* Lots more experimentation, “like a teenager’s goth phase.” To this list add Elvis Costello’s Sundance Channel talk show, U2’s 3D movie, and any number of endorsement deals, commercials, and merchandising plays assembled from industry fragments as the music labels begin to crash and burn.
In the end, it’s about giving away the perfect format of the artist’s brand for free (why not? It can be produced and sold for virtually nothing) but exacting a premium for the non-reproducible, thrilling, experience of the artist’s brand.

Does anything here apply to brand building in our world?

If the future of brands is about stepping beyond the perfect print and TV ad proscenium into the human experiential, I’d say just about everything.

In recessionary times (see under GE, Earnings Statement, 4.11.08), companies nearly always become more conservative about the value of marketing. That’s no surprise, though I’m still taken aback, working through my third economic downturn in this industry, at how quickly the winds shift. Just yesterday I heard about a client whose $10 million marketing budget had, in the course of five months, been whittled down to just north of $900,000 at the lower edge of the range.

So is marketing an investment or a line item expense, and what business problems can it solve? Local academic marketing programs often ask someone from PJA to come in and present the BtoB perspective on these eternal questions (see under John Wanamaker, advertising budget, which half is wasted), and though these are basic tenets of marketing, it never hurts to be reminded during an economic period when business common sense is often the first thing to suffer.

Here’s the list our head of interactive plans to present at an upcoming marketing class in a lecture hall near you: (more…)

Now that we are ‘officially’ in a recession, the realization of which typically means that we are in the middle of or on our way out of one, we’re seeing a curious trend here at the agency. Companies that we’ve never talked to, companies we haven’t heard from in years, and companies we’ve never heard of, period – are asking us to help them choose a position. It might be a new position or it might be an updated position to suit these less-forgiving times.

In some cases these companies have their business strategy set but no story with aspiration or vision that sits above the strategy and unites every business unit. As a result they can’t get the right valuation from analysts or they’re stuck in the wrong competitive set. In other cases the company has chosen a position and is interested in a gut-check, hiring us on a consultative basis first. (These ‘trial-size’ contracts are a classic sign of an economic downturn.)

In other situations the company’s markets are consolidating by the minute, driven by the entrance of a behemoth competitor (on Mondays and Wednesdays insert “Google,” on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays insert “Microsoft”) and they need an irrefutable statement of why choosing best-of-breed still matters over giving in to the inevitable one-stop shop.

In still others, the company is growing too quickly to come up with a new position that works for the next stage of growth, realizing that if they don’t, they’ll put the brakes on that growth because they just don’t pass the smell test of the CXO customer versus the regional VP they’ve sold to successfully in the past. (more…)

Thanks to DJ Howatt, I have my nose in the Harvard Business Review for the first time in too long. (When did it go up to $18 an issue?)

The piece he blogged about is called “The Four Truths of the Storyteller,” by Peter Guber. I’ve been seeing Guber’s name in the press for years and know that he’s on the respected side of the feared/respected line in Hollywood (did I mention he’s from Newton, MA?). I can’t say I’m a huge fan of all his films (he did executive produce Midnight Express), but like a pharmaceutical scientist, the fact that he actually got 50 films ‘into the clinic’ (that is, produced) says a lot about his tenacity.

His piece on narrative and its role in effective communications is a winner. And the thesis is simple: to tell a powerful story, you must show truth to yourself, to the audience, to the moment, and to the mission at hand. What interested me was the way the word ‘brand’ can be swapped out for ’story’ or ’storyteller’ in some of the piece’s signature quotes. Brands, after all, are stories.

Here are a few favorites (call it a miniature linguistic mashup):
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