Think. Story. Experience.

Forget Twitter, I've got a new pet hate

Check out Plinky.

Or, on second thoughts don't bother.

The whole concept is horribly depressing, plumbing the depths of banal, same-same self-expression.

Doesn't anyone have anything interesting to do with their time any more?

And now I've been inspired to write five lines more than I should have by it...

Culture clubs

The more you engage with the ways the world has changed, the more you realise that the culture, spirit, ethos, behaviour, and drive of organisations and the groups of individuals within them are the only things that really matter. Whether you're talking about a hotel chain, an airlines, a search engine, or a political party, everything else flows from there.  

The more you shift your sights from promotion and persuasion (old marketing) to innovation and improvement (new marketing), the more you realise that it is people who will make (or break) the difference every time.

And the more that you sit in meetings with clients who boast of the dysfunctionality of their organisations, as if they are proud of the limitations their culture places upon them, the more you realise that the biggest favour you could do them would be to fix their culture.

This piece on Manchester United from the Guardian, in the lead-up to the European Cup Final next week, sums up the spirit that great sporting teams so often manage to create, but which businesses and brands so often lack. If you want to pick out one quote that tells you everything that's right about Manchester United's culture, and that's probably wrong with yours, try this line from Patrice Evra, United's French left back, talking about the importance of the United story to him...

"It is always hard to put on that shirt because every day when you do you are putting the story on your back."

Something to check out...if you're in London

Melanie Crete (who handles PR for weknowwhatyoudidlastnight) blogs here about the new Unseen Guy Bourdin exhibition at the very cool Wapping Project space in East London.

I love Guy Bourdin's work because he understood the right way to use photography to make ads and create images for brands. His work both for French Vogue and for Charles Jourdan is just beautiful...sexy, subtle, and very effective.

Blurring the lines between art and marketing, understanding how to create aspiration and desire, and contributing to popular culture in the process. If only more modern marketers would check out the exhibition and learn something...

That's so 20th Century...

The front page of the New York Times today carries a story about ConAgra frozen pot pies. In 2007, the product was responsible for 15,000 people falling ill with salmonella.

Two years later, the NY Times reports, ConAgra still haven't been able to figure out which ingredient was responsible for poisoning people, so their new packaging simply advises people to check the internal temperature of the 69-cent pie with a meat thermometer!

The paper puts it well, saying the ConAgra is making consumers responsible for the "kill step". I just find the idea of asking consumers to cope like this unbelievable, and so 20th century!

Free fatigue

I'm just following up on my post about (Ex-NIN drummer) Josh Freese's unique album retail model (starting at under ten bucks for the download, and going up to $75,000 for a variety of extraordinary experiences, including having Josh work for you for a month).

Here's a great blog post by Kate at Outlandos Music, which helps to make sense of Josh's rationale. Kate argues that we're all suffering from free overload, that free is now dead, that expensive is the new free, and that tangible things count most. Read her post here, it's really good stuff.

An oldie, but a goodie

My strategy/planning type colleague Umit sent me this great post from Nicholas Carr's Rough Trade blog on the psychology of Twitter. It's actually a re-posting of a piece Nicholas wrote more than two years ago, which just reminds you how long it takes something like Twitter to 'tip' even in the age of hyper-connectedness.

Read the blog post for the full article. My favourite bit goes...

"The great paradox of 'social networking' is that it uses narcissism as the glue for 'community'. Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self's bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can't quite bring myself to believe that I'm real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I'm walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols."

The squirrel --- a case study in brand-building

Hanging out in Manhattan's parks has got me thinking. What's the difference between a rat and a squirrel? In truth, DNA has little to do with it...a grey squirrel is just a rat with a bushy tail, right? And yet the two urban-dwelling creatures provoke very different reactions from people. Why? One word...brand.

Just look at the squirrel as a case study in brand building...

Name --- Squirrel sounds nice. Squirreling sounds fun. Rats, rattiness, and getting ratted on are not good things. The beginnings of a strong brand are often found in a good name (or a quirky or bad name well used).

Packaging --- Rats are sleek with tails like electrical cable, while squirrels are bushy and big-tailed. Packaging your branded good or service in the right way, creating visual and sensual pleasure for your target audience, is another key aspect of a strong brand.

Context --- You tend to encounter squirrels in parks, while rats are seen in gutters, litter bins, and subway stations. Never mind that both are feeding on trash, the context in which we see squirrels creates an entirely different emotional response to them.

Behaviour --- When squirrels eat, they sweetly clutch nuts in between their little paws. Or at least we all visualise them doing so. Which leads to...

Story --- Great brands emerge from good businesses when the stories about them develop their own momentum, and when tribes or communities fiercely and spontaneously choose to protect them. More people tell and spread better stories about squirrels than rats, so the brand self-reinforces.   

The squirrel is not a comprehensive case study in brand building, just an everyday one.

A couple of quick thoughts

More on Twitter (I hate how much I am thinking about this empty vessel right now). This chart over at Brand Republic shows which brands are getting the most tweettime.

Meanwhile, in news from back home in Australia, is it just me or is there something profoundly depressing (albeit predictable) about the fact that Westpac's new brand strategy designed to reconnnect customers with their local branches will be led by a 60-second TV spot, magazine double-page spreads, and billboard advertising? Admittedly there's also talk of bringing back the branch managers and having local fleets of cars displaying the local branch telephone number, but it still feels like it's the big ad campaign that's taking the lead.

Do something real. Fix the problem. Provide something new and genuinely worthwhile. Then you can talk, shout, and tweet about it. Sadly, most brands remain determined to take the easy route and talk themselves up before they have anything worth saying.

Killed by its own success? Probably not, unfortunately...

Interesting piece on The Times newspaper's technology blog about how Twitter is about to get assaulted by a wave of marketing-driven nonsense.

Given that Twitter appears to be built on nonsense in the first place (with rare, cute exceptions, like my local coffee shop in New York, City Bakery, which tweets to its community when newly-hot cookies come out of the oven), the addition of a layer of marketing bullshit will probably do it no harm at all.

Fighting back against the pollution that is outdoor advertising

I love this mission statement for the Public Ad Campaign...

Public Ad Campaign acts on the assumption that public space and the public's interaction with that space is a vital component of our city's health. By visually altering and physically interacting with the public environment, residents become psychologically invested in their community.

Outdoor advertising is the primary obstacle to open public communications. By commodifying public space, outdoor advertising has monopolized the surfaces that shape our shared space. Private property laws protect the communications made by outdoor advertising while systematically preventing public usage of that space.

In an effort to illuminate these issues, Public Ad Campaign chronicles the activities of artists intent on challenging these relationships, as well as other contemporary issues in outdoor advertising and public space.

Through bold acts of civil disobedience we hope to air our grievances in the court of public opinion and witness our communities regain control of the space they occupy.