Metaphor Country

Coffee and Souls at Starbucks

Courtesy of AlfadogPR, in a post about social media and the union new-media organizing campaign at Starbucks, there's this gem from a 60 Minutes interviewwith Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz:

Here people called "coffee masters" talk about finding romance and passion in a cup like they were cream and sugar. Schultz has brewed up a coffee culture that's, sometimes, a little hard to swallow.

"One of our colleagues coined a phrase a long time ago and said, 'We're not in the business of filling bellies. We're in the business of filling souls,'" says Schultz.

"Oh now, come on," says Pelley. "No wait a minute. That's too … this is a company. This is a corporation. Come on."

"OK, it is a corporation," Schultz acknowledges.

"You're blowing smoke now," Pelley replies.

Shultz won't let it go:

"No, I mean this is how we feel. You might say, 'OK, they're full of crap.' And you know, this is how we feel," says Schultz. "We're in the business of human connection and humanity, creating communities in a third place between home and work."

Uh, right.

Not surprisingly, the "filling souls" bit is the opening quote in the pro-union "Stop Starbucks" video.  A big, windy, over-the-top claim like that is a hanging curveball - you can't help but swing at it and chances are you're going to connect.

Why bring this up?  Because, as inflated as the "filling souls" claim is, it's not far different from a lot of corporate slogans and strategies and messages.  I've lost count of the number of clients I've had who wanted their companies to be religious cults.  No, they didn't say that in so many words.  And some of them weren't even aware of it (some were).  But at the end of the day, branding exercises are often about an appeal to intangibles and longings.  "[Product] will lead you to fulfillment."  "We're not a [product] company, we're an [intangible longing, soul-fulfilling] company."  Nike isn't a sneaker company, it's a win-at-all-costs company - a sort of Calvinist salvation through supreme effort.  McDonald's isn't a hamburger company - it's a warm-embrace-of-family company - salvation through love.

More some other time about the cultural impoverishment that's turned consumer products into religious vessels.  What's interesting here from a communications perspective is how quickly the inflated claim blows up. 

Peter at AlfadogPR is interested in the dynamics of the medium - that the social media channels that helped build Starbucks can be turned against them so quickly.  That's worth talking about.  What jumps out at me is the content problem.  A big juicy over-reach - "we fill souls" - would have done fine in the old broadcast world.  Sure, it's over the top, and it might have provoked some blowback - maybe Leno would have done a riff on it - but that would have been fine.  It would have helped extend the brand message.  But now, in a post-broadcast world, you can't afford a big gap between claim and reality - because reality is too accessible (cf. Wikipedia) and quick-forming communities have the motive and opportunity to challenge you and take you down.  Especially if those people have a vested interest - like union organizers, for example.  But an ordinary mob of consumers can do it to you, too. 

In other words, branding as you knew it is dead.  So is messaging.  So are buzzwords and catchphrases.  So are all the one-sided devices that companies used to manipulate audiences - excite them, motivate them, "activate" them, as marketers like to say (as though they were passive automata just waiting to be plugged in).

A few additional thoughts here about the death of conventional messaging in the political arena.

If old-style branding and messaging doesn't work, what will?  That's a topic for a future discussion, but in a nutshell: reasonable, non-hyperbolic, fact-based claims and viewpoints that you develop in collaboration with your audience.  Your audience is going to collaborate with you whether you like it or not.  Might as well meet them halfway.

Maybe what I'm talking about seems deadly but it doesn't need to be.  Entertainment works, fun works, and irony works really, really well.  Solemnity doesn't, and obvious attempts to manipulate don't either.  Dialogue is best.  To have one, all you have to do is get out of your corporate seat, embrace sheer terror, and give up all hope of control.  Then you'll be fine.

It's a big subject - and I'll be back to it soon.

 

More on Sotomayor: Battling Buzzwords

The Sotomayor fight is evolving along predictable lines - at least where language is concerned.

As predicted (here, too), the Republicans are moving away from "empathy" as in "Empathy: Bad" and toward "feelings" - judges shouldn't make decisions based on their "feelings."  Probably a bit more effective.  It's hard to be against empathy but easier to be against feelings, at least when you're playing out the (questionable) notion that judges ought to be robots executing an abstract, impersonal program called "the law."  David Brooks is pretty good at undermining that idea today, at least until he comes out where he has to, in favor of restraint...

Meanwhile, Sotomayor supporters are casting about for their own counter-buzzwords.  At the moment the winner seems to be "modesty," as in "judicial modesty."  Neat enough - it echoes Chief Justice Roberts, suggests its own kind of restraint ("she's not an ideologue") and suggests that it's the Right that's driven by ideology.  And it calls a bluff - if the Right wants restraint, here it is.  Checkmate.

Which is fine, as far as it goes.  I would have been happier if the Sotomayor camp had put aside buzzwords altogether and trumped the Republicans by opening up a real discussion.  "Let's forget about catchphrases - aren't you too smart to be manipulated by all that? - and instead, let's talk about the record.  And let's talk about how an appellate judge really makes decisions..."

That, to me, is a win.  Because what that acknowledges - and the GOP won't - is that the age of the buzzword is over.  There's too much information available, and too many ways of getting at it, and too many opportunities for real conversation, in real time or something like it, for an argument to succeed or fail on a turn of phrase.  That's the old broadcast model at work.  And we're in a post-broadcast world.  Substance wins, style doesn't, and manipulation fails because - like everything else these days - it's completely transparent.  You can't be an effective puppet-master when everybody can see the strings.

So don't play the GOP's word games.  We're beyond framing.  Roll out the big truck full of facts, and show the people what's really going on and what you really mean.  That's what gets you respect, and support, and takes you where you need to go.

Microsoft and Google: Disrespecting the Bing

Sorry, obvious, but I had to go there.

Putting that aside... in the middle of all the noise about Microsoft's Bing announcement, there's an interesting question - can you invent a brand in a lab and expect it to go native?

From the NY Times coverage:

Bing, the name Microsoft gave to the new search service it unveiled Thursday, is its answer to Google — a noun that once meant little but has become part of the language as a verb that is a synonym for executing a Web search...

And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too.

One big difference - Microsoft and its branding and marketing crew are trying to "verb" Bing.  Google was turned into a verb by... well, by the people.

Google’s name is a play on the word googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The company has said the name speaks to its ambitious mission to organize all the world’s information.

In other words, Google named itself.  Users verbed it - the term "to Google" is a marketplace invention, not the company's.

Which is why it works.

Collaboration works.  Top-down doesn't.  Open source works.  The broadcast model doesn't.  Things go viral because they strike a nerve and people pick them up and run with them - not because the chief marketing officer and his gang lock themselves in a conference room and come out with something viral.

It's messy and it's unpredictable and it's intensely uncomfortable for corporate friends, who seem to think that loss of control is a kind of death.  But in a post-broadcast world, it's the only way to go.

Question - will people Bing? 

Answer - no.

Maddow on Sotomayor Drives Me Underground

I've been falling away from Rachel Maddow since the election - at the end of the day, I don't like the brain-dead left any better than I like the brain-dead right.  Last night's piece on Sotomayor finished it for me - no going back.  Her coverage ("Oh, my God, she's not really a leftist!") was so uninformed, off-target and ideologically driven that I fled all the way to Democratic Underground, where I never, never, never go.

And that's where, among the ranting, I found this:

i saw her report and what she did was cherry pick decisions to make Sotomayor sound like a conservative without even reviewing what the cases were, or even a detail about them (for example, were they good cases?)

if you bring a bad case in favor of civil rights and you lose, does that mean the judge is against civil rights? this is the key information that Rachel, quite irresponsibly, left out.

Ah, yes - judicial reality.  Context.  Facts.  But they won't do what I want them to.

Time to move on...

Back at You, Alfadog: Communications, Values, Morality and Like That

Peter at AlfadogPR is thinking about the GOP's branding problems - and grappling with issues of communications, values, morality and how they intersect.  No small task.  If it was up to me (which it isn't), I'd go with a cleaner definition of values:

10. values, Sociology. the ideals, customs, institutions, etc., of a society toward which the people of the group have an affective regard. These values may be positive, as cleanliness, freedom, or education, or negative, as cruelty, crime, or blasphemy.

In other words, values, as a class, are inherently neutral.  You can value ethical corporate behavior or you can value rule-bending as long as it pays off for you and your shareholders.  "Greed is good" is a value - not one you might like, but a value nevertheless.

Same thing with morality:

1. conformity to the rules of right conduct; moral or virtuous conduct.

Once again, it's consensual - "affective regard," same as above.

So I'd argue that Peter isn't upset about the absence of values and morality, or that they're de-valued - he's upset because the values he sees aren't the ones he wants.

Which is fine because it points at a bigger problem, namely this: people in businesses and organizations like to talk about values and morals (and ethics, let's not forget ethics) as something separate, self-contained and split-off from the day-to-day running of the operation.  A committee writes a set of values and they get stuck on a paperweight and handed out to everyone.  There's an ethics training module that's dropped into some other curriculum (I went through one during my Masters program - they took two sessions out of a policy analysis course and had us read Lying and that was about it).

Related to this: communications, as a discipline, is also treated as something separate and distinct.  It might be the department or function that puts out the press releases.  It might be the one that's called on to "spin" whatever bad thing just happened as a result of the values or morals or ethics or what have you.

I'm playing with a different idea - that communications as a discipline, and values as an organizing principle, need to re-integrated with the rest of the organization and treated as something pervasive, something that's involved with every aspect of operations.  It's not a matter of these ideals over here, and that set of practical problems over there.  It's all one thing.

What would that approach look like and how would it work?  More on this soon.

"Empathetic Activism"

Interesting, in the immediate wake of the Sotomayor announcement, to see the Republicans shifting their game a little on the question of empathy.  As noted here and elsewhere, attacking empathy didn't seem like the world's best idea.  In the past few days, at least some of the opposition gang has put a variation in play - all of a sudden, what they're opposed to isn't empathy, it's "empathetic activism."  That is, it's not the pure quality of empathy that's the problem, it's the "activist" stance that they've been against for years.  Empathy isn't the main show anymore - it's a modifier describing a kind of activism, which is the real demon.

Ed Gillespie seems to have been the first to come out against "empathetic activism," though it's quickly become a standard talking point.  I wonder how well it'll do - not as a means of trashing the nomination (that's not going to happen), but as a new set of GOP fighting words.  My take is that people still like empathy, and in a few days or weeks "empathetic" will fade into the background.  Republicans will be opposing activism, same as ever.

The term "empathetic activism" seems to have a longer history in education circles, where, not surprisingly, it's seen as a good thing - a key component of developmental progress beyond "mere" multiculturalism.  Here's a 2008 presentation that includes a citation from 2000, and it's cited in the abstract here as one of the "six characteristics of universal citizenship" - also in an educational context.

Seems like a clever GOP researcher - possibly armed with Google - has been busy.  Nice try, using captured progressive ammunition.  It'll be fun to see if it works.  I vote no. 

Peggy Noonan Curses Linguistic Fog, Then Sails Into It

There were many extraordinarily bad things in Peggy Noonan's latest - the most obvious being her funeral oration for the golden goose of free-market capitalism.  For a good general takedown, see Scott Rosenberg's commentary.

What struck me was something a little different, namely this: she attacks the Obama administration for obscurantist language, then serves up the following...

The second great fear [after the death of the aforementioned goose] is that the balance between those who pay taxes and those who need benefits will be left, after the great flurry, all out of whack. When this balance is deeply disturbed or distorted, when the number of those who need to take truly overwhelms those who need to make, a tipping point occurs. People become disheartened. Generations become resigned. Tiredness steps in. We will miss irrational exuberance.

Ah, excuse me, Peggy, but isn't that your own brand of linguistic fog?  First of all, there's the odd passive tone.  Apparently because of some external oppression - the arrival of socialistic, Obama-speaking technocrats - "[the] balance is... disturbed... People become disheartened. Generations become resigned.  Tiredness steps in."  There has been a great disturbance in the Force.  Attention must be paid.

If I'm not mistaken, the balance was disturbed and the people became disheartened because of irrational exuberance.  It's not being taken away arbitrarily - it's what got us here.  Basically, she's telling us that the passengers on the Titanic miss recklessness and bad shiphandling.

But apart from the Ayn-Randian melodrama, there's also this insidious bit: "...when the number of those who need to take truly overwhelms those who need to make..."  Once again, a tap on the shoulder... Miss Noonan?  A large number of those who need to take used to be those who need to make.  That's true in my case... and in my father's case... and in millions of other cases.  See, it's not that there's a permanent underclass desperately scrabbling at the wallets of the overachievers.  It's that the people who swallowed the party line and tried to be overachievers are now below the line.  Disheartened.  Resigned.  Tired.  All thanks to that terrific irrational exuberance, again.

Of course, the problem is that Noonan thinks there is a scrabbling underclass - and that it's undermining the moral fiber of good hardworking people in her "Old America."  The truth is there aren't two classes - instead, there's a steady flow between them.  At the moment the flow is mostly downward.  Yesterday's have is today's have-not.

But to admit that suggests that something's wrong in the system, and that the irrationally exuberant free market may not be the answer, and that "old America" is a bit like Willoughby.  A nice image.  Shame it doesn't exist anymore.  Shame it never did.  But you can get there if you try.

Treatment for Those Boils: Does Job Use Dove Bodywash?

I'm a bit floored by this.  I was rereading Andrew Sullivan's 2007 debate with Sam Harris on Beliefnet, came to this page, and scrolled down to the word Job - as in "Book of Job," a little more than halfway down.  The name is underlined, and I rolled my mouse over it to see what the inline link would produce.

It launched a video for Dove Go Fresh, which is apparently a bodywash.

Message?  That Unilever products are best for boils?

It's either a moment of random Internet brilliance, or a really subversive online marketing strategy.

If the former, then mark it "to be filed under 'You can't make this stuff up'" in... you know the Zone...

EDIT: When I clicked through to the page again, the link had vanished and others had appeared, none as good.  I guess you had to be there.  Or it was a fleeting glimpse of a meaningful universe. 

Clearly, either God or some marketer has a wicked sense of humor.

Joe's Cow: That Brand Thing Again

Peter Janecek over at Alfadog PR is thinking about brand:

I’m writing this post on my MacBook and I’m not dumb enough to think I couldn’t have done it on my Dell laptop.  But I like the feel of my Mac, the same way I like my iPod.  My Dell costs about half what I paid for my Mac, but it’s one of those “what-the-hell” decisions.  Could this be the definition of a real brand?  Something that gets you to make an irrational buying decision even though it makes no economic sense?  

Uh, yeah, pretty much.  Or let's put it this way - that became the role of brand in a glutted economy where there was too much stuff, and the differences were marginal.  Brand is a symbolic device that justifies a premium.  Or at least it used to.

Originally, brand told you what to expect from a product.  It helps to go back to origins.  Brand was the mark that Joe put on his cow to tell you that this cow was different from all other cows.  If you had a history with Joe, then you knew how he took care of his cows.  He fed them better, he looked after them, they were healthier, they lived longer.  The brand set up your expectations and was all about your history with Joe.  This will be a premium cow because Joe raised it.  Brand was a symbol but was also meaningful because Joe had worked hard to create the expectations and earn your trust.  The brand embodied all that hard work.

Corporations that talk about brand usually don't understand the word that way.  When they talk about brand, they're talking about a symbol that doesn't have any intrinsic meaning - "this is a plain vanilla laptop but if I slap a Dell nameplate on it, people will pay more for it."  The Apple product is more distinctive - a little like Joe's cow.  There might be a fact-based reason to pay more.

Corporations also aspire to brand - as in, "I need to strengthen my brand" or "I could succeed or charge more if I had a brand."  That'd be like Joe saying, "I'm not going to do anything special with this cow - it's just a cow.  But if I could design a really cool symbol and get the guys down at the smithy to hammer one out for me, and if I burn it into the cow, then I could charge eight times more..."

Brand makes sense when you think of it as an end point - the thing you create when you do all the hard work of building a better product and creating a real relationship with customers and earning their trust.  It sums up the quality and the relationship - or it should.  To paraphrase a colleague and mentor - brand is a bad goal but a good result.

To Peter's question - does brand justify irrational buying decisions?  Sure - until the money runs out.  Quality matters, until you can't afford it, then it doesn't.  At that point people forget about brand - or other brands win out.  MacBooks used to be cool but now homebuilt computers are cooler, or something along those lines.  For more, see "price elasticity of demand."  But that's a conversation for another time.

Great Internet Finds: Jughead's Hat

Off topic, but I couldn't resist: more than you ever wanted to know about Jughead's hat.

Hat tip (sorry) to The Comics Curmudgeon.