I've been using mIRC (proto Twitter) since 1995 and I believe it was me who first coined the phrase "right wing nuts" as I noticed everyone on #politics picked up on it immediately and then it entered the general discourse. Not a lot of people know that.
We're long past the point of anthropomorphizing brands. The idea that Old Spice might have a proper personality when it started would have seemed risible. To this day extraordinary individuals still impose themselves on great branded communications through their entrepreneurial cojones, product obsession and unsurpassed love of customer service.
Now of course back here on planet earth where the average tenure of a Marketing Director is under two years the onus on those individuals is to deliver in the short term and NOT DROP the ball. This is largely why we have the wind tunnel effect and something more insidious than product parity.
Personality Parity.
But let's not point the finger too much because if we take a good look in the mirror, we advertising agencies have traded off the right to challenge our clients for an unseemly all out internecine warfare to pursue the last possible buck left in the bottom of the bucket.
It's not hard to see the reasons for this, but the point is that we live in remarkable times so why are we engulfed by the unremarkable when it comes to communications? We have an increasing number of brands talking back to us in real time. The implications for this are unrecorded in history. So how do we bring this potential to life?
Ah yes. Give it a minute because the effect is worth considering.
The thing is we're human, we're always anthropomorphising stuff; projecting ourselves, applying our value system to 'the other'. Cars have long been female in the UK and the older the better. It seems the more curious the peccadilloes they had, the more we were attached to them. That doesn't apply so much in the age of what I might call the neo-neoterics the obsession with the new.
Of course it's not as if we need to apply the Geneva Convention to objects but there is always a sliding scale where say humans are top of the personality food chain, then animals, then products, then services, then hedge fund traders.
Getting back on track we're confronted by the uncharted waters of deeper and more meaningful communication. Now personality goes a long way, but the reality is the construct of the corporation and its paralytic fear of diminished quarterly results means it's unlikely that most brands are going to get a life in the near future. If you get close enough to some of the most hard working clients the sheer pressure of work restricts their ability to know precisely what a life is (they pay people to find out) and which is why there are often so many dumb perambulations between and after idea and execution.
They are going to achieve this through the simple yet infinite scope of dialogue as opposed to the top down, controlled and linear monologue broadcast models of yesteryear.
How that personality manifests itself is a highly contextual subject dependant on a lot of factors that requires a post in itself, and which would still not provide a definitive answer. However the reason for me revisiting this less than revolutionary subject is because I see the scope for brands articulating their personality through their politics.
It's been done before
This anti sweatshop brand was getting close recently but economic timing was bad and franchise extension was, well, over extended.
I don't want to harp on about this because if there's one weakness I have as a planner it is that I see the potential too early too discern the reality. Time and again I've been excited about what's round the corner and tried to implement before gestation had completed. I noticed that the presentation I gave to low income Asian marketeers from multinationals a couple of years ago is only now starting to realise itself in India.
While it might not be prudent for a brand to immediately take a political stance, the age of the corporation as it emerges blinking with moral fatigue from the 20th century is fast becoming an anachronism. We need to be having a discussion about what exactly brands stand for if a non conformative position or a set of values becomes strategically imminent. The reason for that is entirely business-like. It's a profitable and identifiable stance to take and if you think that online group purchases known as Tuangou in China, are an interesting phenomenon, just you wait till INACTION becomes political. The potential for global boycotts of brands that don't play ball has yet to emerge, even though precedents exist with some of the most crippling action taking place in times before our hyper networked world.
This isn't a post that negates the value of brand utility (an important post to factor in if you weren't so busy and have kindly got this far anyway) but it is one that says if your brand isn't social, it probably has nothing to say. That's an impoverished strategic weakness in an age of product parity and one that will cost a lot more (and a lot quicker than we're used to).
Words are what distinguish us from any other life form on the planet and possibly the universe. Words could arguably be the reason our neo cortex accelerated into action at some point in our evolutionary story, and I put it to you that if your words are increasingly circumscribed by a language that is unremarkable, then the quickest way to get out of that is to take a stand, pick a cause and stick to your guns.
I'm really pleased to have come across this today as it stimulates some of my own thinking and saves me boring you with too many words ( OK Andrew?). A little background for my motivation on this subject is that each time I walk past local schools, as the children are piling out, I'm noticing that the number of fat kids is rocketing and in some instances constitutes the majority of the students.
Obesity is a problem now, and it only took one generation to make the jump.
The leap between skinny and irreversibly fat kids took only a few short years in Asia. I've noticed it from Beijing to Manila but here in Thailand it feels particularly poignant as I remember a time when 7-Eleven had hardly any dairy products and people didn't know what cheese really was. These days if I want to re-conjure up the elegance of a thin and beatiful race from the early nineties I need to head out into rural Thailand closer to the villages and the paddy fields, where I'm magically sent back to that bygone era. One where rice is the staple diet and a few morsels of meat with lots of vegetables keeps them looking so fabulous.
As an adman I find this troubling and yet another hurdle (on top of sustainable wealth creation) to reconcile doing good work with good intentions.
Paul French who I've long admired as a thoughtful China commentator is interviewed here by another China afficianado Jeremy Goldkorn about his new book Fat China. They both dissect the issue in a manor which is contextually interesting even if you're not in Asia but interested in adding dimensionality to what's going on with expanding waistlines of the Occidental races: Europe, U.S and Australia.
The most compelling point for me if you can't spare 10 minutes to watch is that, we advertisers idealise children as chubby when selling to Mom children's food and drinks, and yet when they turn to 'Pepsi' teens we suddenly try to sell them the Heroin-teen-chic matchstick-thin lifestyles when biologically the toothpaste is out of the tube if one is serious about reversing the obesity process.
This is morally wrong and a point I hadn't thought of before; one I'll never let slip by again.
