Steve Yastrow

It’s the Brand Story, Stupid!

One week later, the Big Branding Story from the election is so obvious its not worth much more ink.  Even more than the branding disparity between Clinton and Bush in 1992 (”It’s the economy stupid” vs. a mish-mash of who-knows-what), McCain’s pathetic use of Brand Harmony gave the hyper-clear Obama story lots of room to take root.  (For more, see the New York Times Magazine story on October 26, “The Making (and Remaking) of McCain)

So, let’s not waste more time on the obvious.  Instead, let’s focus on what we can learn from it.  I see hundreds of executives every year in workshops, where I ask them to evaluate their brand stories.  I can’t tell you how underwhelmed I usually am. Is there a more important question for a business than, “What do you want your customers to believe about you?”  Well, my empirical evidence shows that most brand stories are as loose as that of 2008 McCain or 1992 G.H.W. Bush.

So, no matter who you voted for (i.e., does this situation make you gloat or vomit), I encourage you to see the power of a clear, compelling story, communicated with a fully-integrated sense of Brand Harmony. Your customers’ lives are so busy and crowded, and your customers are so savvy and discerning, that you can’t not create powerful relationships with them without a solid brand story.

To paraphrase the Clinton campaign in 1992: “It’s the story, stupid!”

So, what kind of shape is your brand story in?

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What Colin Powell says about McCain’s marketing efforts

This is not a policitcal blog.  It focuses on connecting with customers, forming strong customer relationships, and related marketing issues.

So … read this as a marketing commentary.

One of the pillars of my beliefs about marketing, as captured in my book Brand Harmony, is that today’s customers are too savvy and self-reliant to believe everything they are told in marketing messages.  Marketing communication isn’t about what you say.  It’s about what people believe after you say (and do) it.

Yesterday, Colin Powell credited the negative tone of the McCain campaign and specious claims McCain’s team has made about Obama as key drivers in his decision to endorse Barack Obama.  He also criticized the McCain campaign’s lack of clarity and consistency in their approach to the economy, saying, “Every day there was a different approach.”

In addition to other, policy-driven reasons, which are not my subject here, Powell’s endorsement reinforces this key idea of modern marketing.  Customers are highly scrutinizing, and all aspects of your message need to blend in Brand Harmony if you hope to create a powerful, motivating message.

McCain should have looked at the key marketing lesson of the 1992 Clinton-Bush race: “It’s the economy, stupid.”  By having an incredibly clear focus, Bill Clinton out-marketed Bush Sr., whose messages were more muddled and harder to hold in your hand.

Maybe this is why an Ad Age poll selected Obama as marketer of the year, beating out Apple, Nike and, yes, McCain.

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Mozart’s Brand Harmony Lesson

Last Sunday, after a weekend that included two trips to the theater, I wrote a post about how Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater inspired me to think about capturing the opportunity for personal encounters. In the post I said I also wanted to write about a passage from Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, also seen that weekend, but couldn’t find the text.  Thanks to Jeff Pasquale for sending the text, which teaches us lessons about Brand Harmony.

At one point, (I found a picture of the scene!) Mozart is talking about how he can create harmony in an opera in a way that can’t happen with spoken text in a play:

Sire, only opera can do this. In a play, if more than one person speaks at the same time, it’s just noise. No one can understand a word. But with music, with music you can have twenty individuals all talking at once, and it’s not noise - it’s a perfect harmony. Isn’t that marvelous? But it’s new, it’s entirely new. It’s so new, people will go mad for it. For example, I have a scene in the second act - it starts as a duet, just a man and wife quarreling. Suddenly the wife’s scheming little maid comes in unexpectedly - a very funny situation. Duet turns into trio. Then the husband’s equally screaming valet comes in. Trio turns into quartet. Then a stupid old gardener - quartet becomes quintet, and so on. On and on, sextet, septet, octet! How long do you think I can sustain that?

This passage teaches us a lesson about how customers listen to our businesses.  If we’re not careful, the different voices our customers hear will be “just noise.”  Or, if we craft it well, the different voices can blend “and it’s not noise - it’s a perfect harmony,” as Shaffer’s Mozart tells us.

As I wrote in a recent newsletter, Brand Harmony describes one of my most fundamental beliefs about branding, marketing and connecting with customers.  As customers interact with your business, they are listening for how all of the different interactions blend together, creating a story.  What would Mozart hear when listening to your story?

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Whose brand is damaged?

I am a very satisfied subscriber to Audible.  Their selection is great, the system is easy, and I always have an active audiobook on my iPod.

Tom Segev is a great writer.  His books on modern Israeli history, while controversial, are well-researched, well-written and captivating.

Segev’s latest book, 1967, as I reach chapter 2 of the audiobook, is  really interesting and informative.  It was translated by Jessica Cohen.  It’s got the sign of a good translation: I’m confident I’m getting the whole story, but the narrative sounds like it was written in English, not Hebrew.

The 1967 audiobook was published by Tantor Media, who list 731 titles on Audible.

James Boles, the narrator of 1967, has a good voice and reads well.  However, his pronunciation of the Hebrew or Arabic words in the text (place names, peoples’ names, names of organizations) is atrocious.  It’s almost impossible to listen to him.  Even worse, he’ll pronounce the same word different ways, each time he comes to it.

So, does this poor performance reflect only on Boles, or also on Audible, Tantor Media, Segev, 1967, and Cohen?

It reminds me of my days, just after business school, wholesaling vacations to Las Vegas and Hawaii.  If a United Airlines flight attendant sneered at one of my customers, I had to deal with a complaint letter.  There was also the irate customer who wanted me to return his money because he walked into his Maui hotel room, which he had chosen from my brochure, and the housekeeper was sitting on his toilet.

Customers use Brand Harmony to evaluate us, meaning that every point of interaction influences a customer’s brand impression.  I guess you could say that James Boles and Tantor Media are responsible, but I’ll certainly think twice about my next audiobooks from Audible or Segev.  Wouldn’t you?

Entrusting our products to others is a risky business.  Be cautious of those who influence your brand.

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You touch it, you bought it!

I just checked into a beautiful, spacious suite at The Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. This room is four times the size of any hotel room I would choose for myself; thank you to the folks at Subway, for whom I’m speaking tomorrow, for the nice room.

Before sending me up to my luxurious suite, the very nice front desk clerk, Anna, warned me about the mini-bar refrigerator. “It’s touch-sensitive,” cautioned Anna, “So if you open it and pick anything up to look at it, you’ll be charged for it.”

What if I want to read the label on the Pellegrino to see how many calories are in it? Or closely study the logo on a can of Budweiser?

I arrived in the suite, and got lost for a few minutes finding my way around, marveling at all of the amenities I would not have time to enjoy during my short stay. Remembering Anna’s admonition, I located the refrigerator and looked at the outer door. (No way was I going to open it and risk maxing out my credit card) A sign on the door said that “For Your Convenience” you will be automatically charged if you grab anything.

Wow. The Venetian is offering me all of this comfort in my suite, but I was feeling like I better be careful or they might reach in my wallet while I’m not looking. What else shouldn’t I touch? What other secret charges are lurking in wait for me?

Suddenly, I thought of the hangers in the closet. I went to look. Sure enough, they were the kind that have the extra-small loops, to go over the extra-thin rod, so you won’t steal them. Nobody has closet rods in their homes that can fit these types of hangers. Like a Motel 6, The Venetian wants to make sure I won’t walk off with their clothes hangers.

So, after initially feeling pampered by The Venetian, I now see that they look at our relationship as if I were an adversary. This is where Brand Harmony meets We relationships … a few small dissonant cues reveal that we are not We.

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The Brute Force Myth

What is the biggest change you need make in your marketing? Embrace new media? Embrace social media? Switch spending from traditional media advertising to other options? Yes, most companies need to do those things, but these changes are secondary to the one really big change you should make, if you haven’t made it already.

The biggest change you need to make in your marketing is to abandon the mindset of “brute force” that has ruled marketing since the mid-20th century. Brute force is the belief that the key to winning customers is to interrupt them as frequently as possible with messages that are as powerful as possible. The brute force philosophy implies that customers are easily swayed, and they are eagerly waiting to receive your communications after which, lemming-like, they will change their behavior.

Listen in on most marketing planning meetings, and you will hear the religion of brute force being preached. “We need a more powerful message to cut through the clutter,” or “we’ll need to increase spending to reach our audience more effectively.” Sales people, also, have been sucked into the brute force vortex. They can be regularly be overheard talking about “getting at bats with a customer” or “giving a pitch.”

Guess what? The days of brute force are waning. The main reason: Customers are not as impressionable as they used to be. They don’t buy your product just because you interrupted them more effectively than another company. The second reason brute force doesn’t work well anymore: Unless you work for Annheuser-Busch or McDonald’s, you don’t have a big enough budget to shout louder than everyone else who is also shouting at your customers.

As Tom Peters once said, “Learning is easy, but unlearning is difficult.” Do your best to unlearn what you’ve been taught about brute force as a marketing strategy. Focus, instead, on what really works: Creating a powerful sense of brand harmony for your customers that helps them hear a clear, compelling story as they interact with your company. Brute force falls on deaf ears, but brand harmony is the first step to creating motivating brand impressions in the minds of your customers.

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