Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

One of the broader points that I don’t know if I made clearly in my last post is that effective communication depends not only on the message you are delivering, but also on the audience which the message is targeting. In the case of writing a resume, you have to remember that you are targeting a busy hiring manager who will spend less than ten seconds in glancing at your resume before making a decision. To get the phone screen, you need to tailor your resume for that audience, rather than doing what is most convenient for you.

This idea of knowing your audience resonates in all aspects of business life. It’s difficult to design an effective communication without knowing who the recipient is. But if you know who are you speaking to and the message you want to deliver to that person, it makes it much clearer how to design that message to reach your target. For instance, when a presentation is not coming together, I am often able to help coworkers by asking who the target audience of the presentation is, and what message they want to deliver to that audience. I’ve learned from my manager to ask of each element of the presentation “So what?” – why should the audience care about what I’m presenting?

As an aside, another aspect of designing effective presentations is realizing that you need to get the audience’s attention in the first 30-60 seconds, just like with a resume. These days, every audience has their smartphones or their laptops in easy reach with lots of distracting possibilities. So your presentation has to grab their attention in the first minute, or they’ll tune you out and go catch up on email or Twitter or Facebook. Any presentation that depends on the audience paying attention for ten minutes before delivering any sort of pay-off is going to fail because the audience will have been lost. As with the resume, what you are really trying to do with a presentation is earn the right to the audience’s attention for a little while longer. Structure the presentation in such a way to deliver value to the audience throughout, or you will lose them.

Being able to understand your audience well either involves empathy or experience. Empathy in the sense that it depends on being able to put yourself in the position of your audience to understand what they care about. Experience can sometimes substitute for empathy as you may have been in the position of your audience yourself (e.g. my experience as a hiring manager has made it clearer to me what other hiring managers might be looking for on a resume). Either way, though, the first step is to step away from your own knowledge and needs to think about what your audience needs to get from your communication.

This is also a key skill as a product manager – understand the target user, figure out what problems they are having and design a new product or feature to solve their problem. All too often, product managers start from a self-centered point of view and create a new product/feature based on what they can offer without thinking through what their user wants. This is particularly common in larger corporations where the product managers are often separated by many layers from dealing with actual customers or users. Meanwhile, in my time at Fog Creek, I spent enough time on the phone doing tech support and sales that the perspective of our customers was never far from my consciousness. Again, either empathy for or experience as the potential user is crucial to making the right decisions.

Developing the ability to effectively construct communications for a variety of audiences, whether the communication is in the form of a presentation, a white paper, an email, or a product requirements document, is a skill that is essential to corporate life (and, really, all of life). So before your next important communication, think about who your audience is, what they want, and how you can construct your communication in such a way as to get your message across more effectively.

P.S. It’s interesting to note how my thinking on this has evolved slightly from my post in 2009 asking what is the story, as I now realize that getting the story right involves understanding the audience. Stories are not universal – they are just one way to convey a message from me to you.

Amazon link

Trade-Off is a book which explores a simple, but useful, way to frame the world. Kevin Maney plots products along two dimensions, fidelity and convenience, and then spends the rest of the book discussing how products end up in different places on that graph, from the “fidelity belly” to the “fidelity mirage”

Fidelity is essentially quality – what makes a product unique or an experience. Examples include luxury goods that identify the owner as a person of taste, or live rock concerts where the sheer sensory overload is unmatchable by one’s stereo.

Convenience is, well, convenience – how easy it is to get the product. This includes both physical convenience as well as cost – places like Wal-Mart aim to maximize convenience by being a one-stop shop with the lowest prices.

Maney makes a few key points:

• There is always a trade-off between fidelity and convenience. Trying to position the same product as being the highest quality as well as the most convenient is oxymoronic (one of his interviewees quips that “A successful business is either loved or needed.”). He calls this the “fidelity mirage” where a company attempts to maximize both dimensions at the same time, which generally leads to failure in the marketplace.
• The products that win pick a dimension to maximize and stick to it. Either they aim to be the high-end of the market, like Apple has with the iPhone, or they aim to be the commodity provider, like Wal-Mart. Being clear about where a product is positioned is essential to success.
• Products that fail to distinguish themselves along either dimension end up in the “fidelity belly”, neither high enough quality to distinguish themselves, nor convenient enough to compensate for the perceived lack of quality.
• One useful observation was that technology continually expands the boundaries of the “fidelity belly”. The feature that made your product unique and special a year ago will get copied by your competitors and is no longer a distinguishing characteristic – the fidelity advantage has been lost. Similarly, a supply chain innovation that enabled lower prices can also be copied, losing the convenience advantage. Companies must keep innovating to stay ahead of their competitors, and only by staying focused on one dimension can they outrace the “fidelity belly”.

That’s basically the whole book right there. He tells a bunch of stories about how companies succeed or fail framed with this viewpoint, but you get the idea.

The book was a good reminder about the importance of focus and positioning; understand where you can get a step on your competition, and then find ways to maintain or extend that lead. The same applies to personal positioning, as Maney mentions in an epilogue. All in all, it was a quick read from the library, but I can’t particularly recommend it.

P.S. Jim Collins, the Good to Great author, wrote the introduction, and had a nice paragraph explaining the value of finding new mental models as tools:

A strategic lens … does not in itself give an answer about what you should do, and not do. Rather, and much better, it forces you to engage in a powerful question, from which you derive your own insight and make your own decisions. If you engage your team in a vigorous debate stimulated by the questions that naturally arise from the ideas in these pages, you will gain deeper understanding not just of what you should be doing (or not) but, even more important, why. The power of a strategic concept lies first and foremost in giving us a lens and a stimulus for hard thinking and hard choices. The critical question is not its universal truth, but its usefulness.

Amazon link

I have been a fan of Grant McCracken’s for several years now, so I was eagerly awaiting his new book, Chief Culture Officer. Note that I may be slightly biased in this review, as Grant mentions me in the book as a potential CCO candidate.

Chief Culture Officer is McCracken’s manifesto of how and why culture matters to the corporation. He starts the book with stories like Levi’s missing a billion dollar opportunity in the mid-90s because they didn’t see the hip-hop trend and therefore didn’t understand why anybody would want baggy jeans. Another example is Steve Jobs revolutionizing industry after industry by leading a new wave of culture e.g. using iTunes and the iPod to create an individual song a la carte option in the music industry so people could create their own mixes. Or Geoffrey Frost at Motorola creating an enormous amount of value with the Razr.

McCracken then dives into several of the trends that have been taking place over the last few decades:

• Culture fast and slow – fast culture is the bleeding edge, particularly notable in the fashion and design industries where “that’s so five minutes ago” is a meaningful insult. Slow culture is represented by less flashy, more subtle trends, like how we think about our food, or how homes are changing to reflect updated needs.
• Status and cool – status is Victorian and high culture – it’s about aspiring to the One True set of status indicators like the luxury car, an appreciation of art and opera, etc. Cool is represented by outsiders such as the beats – it’s doing what the hip kids are doing rather than conforming to society’s expectations. I liked McCracken’s observation that the two trends, at odds throughout the twentieth century, have now fused into an interesting hybrid where “cool” avant-garde liberties in personal expression are eventually co-opted into the social order of “status” (shades of learn and latch).
• Producers and consumers – the age of mass media was about few producers and millions of consumers. We have moved towards a many-to-many fragmented culture, as everybody now has the tools of production. That changes our entire relationship to media, both as producers and consumers.

One insight I particularly liked was that “Convergence culture is fleeting. But it supplies order, and for the CCO this order is a gift”. Seeing the right cultural trend splits the world in a useful way and illuminates events by giving a framework through which to view them. It gives us a meaningful story by which we can interpret what’s happening, and testable hypotheses as to what will happen next. McCracken suggests we should be tracking the trends that we think are happening and revisit those predictions, so that we can learn from our mistakes (I would note that blogs are a particularly good way to track such thoughts).

How does the CCO figure out which are the next meaningful trends, and which are fads that will fade away? They need to monitor magazines, TV shows, internet forums – one person can’t do it all, so how do we collaborate? McCracken suggests having a group of advisors/editors who can collectively share tidbits (I would suggest that Twitter can be useful for this purpose if following the right set of people). And once potential trends of interest are identified, how do we convert those into actionable insights? McCracken suggests that the CCO needs to champion efforts in the corporation that catch the rising wave, and fight back against the ones on the subsiding ones.

Another insight I liked was the corporations breathe culture in and out – “the corporation is not just an economic actor, it is also a social and a cultural one.” Brands are not imposed on people; instead, brands only derive meaning from how people incorporate brands into their self-story. Brands must spark a recognition within the consumer that the brand is a meaningful expression of identity. For instance, cars are a quintessential expression of identity, ranging from muscle cars, hybrids, or minivans. In this vision, brands that aren’t co-opted and multiplied by their users wither away and die.

McCracken finishes up with a chapter on the nitty-gritty of how to observe and monitor culture, including an appendix with “A Tool Kit for the Rising CCO”, which includes recommendations for magazines, TV, events, people, books, etc. His ethnographic perspective emphasizes the act of noticing, both observing a behavior and then explaining it with a story. Part of the challenge of noticing is keeping an open mind. If you go in with an opinion, you’ll fit your observations into that opinion – you have to pay attention what is actually happening and willing to follow up on surprising inconsistencies. The ethnographer is actively engaged, “capturing how and why the assumptions in this life go together, or feel they do”.

I like McCracken’s premise that understanding cultural trends is vital to corporations that want to act effectively in this world. And as usual, I love his insights into our culture – he provides useful stories for understanding what is going on around us. This is the kind of book that is easy to read, but has meaning that is only slowly percolating into how I think. Good stuff.

P.S. As mentioned previously, McCracken is holding a Chief Culture Officer Boot Camp this Saturday in New York. I’m excited to attend, and will report back with my notes and observations afterwards.

Yikes, it has been a long time since I blogged. I’ve been buried at work, although things seem to be slowing down a bit (knock on wood). For those of you that want more regular updates, I recommend Twitter and/or del.icio.us as those get updated more regularly.

This past weekend, though, I made time to watch the Super Bowl, because, well, it’s the Super Bowl. I was alas unable to make it to a Super Bowl party, or even host one myself, because I ended up working both before and after the game. But I enjoyed the Super Bowl experience, both the game and one ad in particular, so I’m going to write about both, because hey, it’s my blog, and I don’t currently have the brainpower to write a “Deep Thoughts What I Have Thunk” post (tm Jofish).

The game itself had some amazing plays. The James Harrison interception was just ridiculous, and may have decided the game, as it was a 14-point swing that killed the Cardinals’ momentum.

But the Cardinals came back, and Larry Fitzgerald’s touchdown was a thing of beauty. You can’t see it from the angles they show in that video, but the play design was just brilliant. Given that Larry Fitzgerald had dominated the postseason and ended up with more yards, receptions and touchdowns of any playoff run ever, it’s almost inconceivable that a defense could possibly let him get wide open and score a lead-changing touchdown. Here’s what happened: The Steelers were in a deep Cover 2 defense, with the safeties 25 yards off the line of scrimmage to take away any chance at a big play. The Cardinals saw that, and lined up three receivers. Two receivers ran straight down the sidelines. The safeties both did what they were supposed to do, and scooted over a few steps to the outside to help the cornerbacks and make sure those outside receivers didn’t get past them. But taking those steps emptied out the middle of the field. Meanwhile, Larry Fitzgerald took an underneath route across the middle, caught the ball, broke one tackle, and then it was just a race to the end zone, which he won. So in the clip when you see three guys chasing him, it’s the two safeties who were lured out of position by the decoy receivers, and a linebacker who was trying to catch up. Just an awesome play call, illustrating the chess game that happens at the highest levels of the NFL.

Meanwhile, my favorite Super Bowl ad, by far, was the Audi: Chase commercial because of the way it layers in meaning after meaning, taking advantage of our cultural knowledge.

1. It’s Jason freaking Statham, star of The Transporter series of movies. Because we know who Statham is and the characters he plays, we automatically ascribe those characteristics to this character. So within five seconds of the commercial starting, we know who the protagonist is, without a single line being spoken.
2. The cultural references it makes in each decade are extremely specific. The cars change, the style of the car chase changes, the music changes, the lighting changes, etc. And, again, we are expected to recognize the evolution because we understand all these references.
   • The 70s: He drives a Mercedes, the chase car is a Ford LTD, the car chase is basic with no crazy moves (remember the first car chase was Bullitt in 1968, and it seems pointlessly long and boring at this point), the music just feels like 70s music, and the lighting is washed-out and hopeless.
   • The 80s: He drives a BMW, the chase car is a Trans Am, the car chase involves a ridiculous jump (remember Knight Rider and the A Team), the music is cheesy synth pop, the lighting is sunny and bright with pastels, the guy is holding a ridiculously large cellular phone, etc.
   • The 90s: He drives a Lexus (okay, makes a disgusted face at a Lexus), the chase car is an SUV, we skip the car chase, the movie marquee refers to Tommy Boy, the lighting is dark and gritty, very much in line with the grunge era.
   • Modern day: Statham is tuxed up, drives the Audi and gets away, despite black-clad motorcyclists, and a chase scene with quick cuts and frenetic motion.

What was incredible about this to me is that they set up these scenes within 10 seconds each by leveraging our cultural knowledge. Using every element available to them, they anchored each scene firmly in a different decade, and were thus able to convey the underlying theme of the commercial which is that the Audi was the apotheosis of car design, the evolutionary endpoint.

I also loved that you can enjoy the commercial without catching any of these references, as it is still satisfying on a basic level, because, hey, three car chases in 60 seconds. But if you catch the references going by, it adds depth and meaning while still staying coherent. I love it when narratives work on multiple levels, so this ad really pleased me.

By the way, I should mention that the second part of this post is an homage to Grant McCracken, whose brilliant post deconstructing the meaning making in a Volvo commercial continues to inspire me to analyze the meanings designed into the world around me. And the Audi commercial was one that just begged for this sort of deconstruction.

I’ll get back to more regular posting soon, with a backlog of book reviews to do, and other topics on my mind. Soon. Really.

Finding the story has been a recurring theme for me recently. It’s come up in a variety of settings, so I thought I’d explore the topic some more. Let’s start with the anecdotes.

A friend was looking for advice on sprucing up her resume. I started with the normal advice of stating accomplishments rather than responsibilities and looking for ways to quantify those accomplishments. But then I observed that it seemed to me that her current draft was more about telling her career history rather than convincing potential employers to give her an interview. A resume is a sales document, and everything on that document should contribute towards persuading the person that reads it to call you. So we went over the positions she was applying for, and looked for ways to tune the resume to match the positions, telling the story of why she would be a good fit for those positions.

At work, I was helping a coworker out with a major presentation by doing some data analysis and pulling some numbers for him. While discussing what analysis he needed, I also was interested in understanding the presentation itself. After asking a few questions, I threw out an idea for the “story” that my coworker was trying to tell with the presentation. He liked it, and went with it, and we constructed the presentation around that story. This turned out to be very useful at the presentation itself, as the meeting with the executives was running late so instead of 20 minutes to present, he only had three. Because we’d already agreed on the major story we were trying to tell, we were able to cut back to those key points and he delivered a compelling two minute summary of his work, leaving a minute for questions.

Another friend is teaching a seminar this term for the first time. I asked him what the class was about, and he started listing off some of the topics he plans to cover. It seemed scattershot to me, so I asked him what the underlying theme was, the one thing he hoped his students would take away from the class even if they didn’t remember anything else. He described in one sentence the awareness he hoped to create in his students, and I hope answering that question will help in designing his curriculum.

In each case, I felt like I contributed something by asking the question “What is the story here?” When we are communicating with others in any form, we need to think about what message we are trying to convey. For our communications to be effective, we need to stick to that message and not introduce potentially confusing or distracting elements. This is a core principle of marketing, but it has applications throughout life.

Whenever we interact with other people, we are marketing something. That may sound crass, but when we interact with another person, we are generally trying to convince them of an idea or convey an image of ourselves. This is why we care so much about what we wear (and even choosing to opt out of caring is still an image choice) – it sends a message. So it’s interesting to me to apply marketing principles to these sorts of interactions – pick a position that is consistent with your “product”, and unify your communications around that message. If you try to be all things to all people, you are sending out contradictory signals that remove any persuasive power of your communication.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t refine your message for a given audience. This is one place I believe my skills as a generalist are valuable. I can generally figure out how to present a set of given information to others in a way that makes sense to them and fits in with their goals. I can talk to specialists for an hour, learning about their issues and results, and create a useful minute-long summary without the specialists feeling like I’m misrepresenting them. It helps to do ongoing summaries throughout the conversation (“So what I think you’re saying is X”) so that you can get feedback (“Actually, I didn’t mean X, I meant Y”). I really enjoy this skill and find it valuable – now I just have to figure out the career path it enables. In some sense, I aspire to be an intra-organization marketer, figuring out how to most effectively present different parts of the organization to each other.

It’s ironic that this post about finding the core story and sticking to it is a bit disjointed. I’ve tried writing this post a few times over the past week, and it’s still not quite coming together. But I’m going to post it anyway, because it’s ludicrous that I haven’t posted anything in weeks. Hopefully, this first pass will spark discussion that gets me pointed towards the story I am really trying to tell.

Yesterday’s post on branding actually started because I have been thinking extensively about personal branding throughout my just-completed job search. Looking for a job entails trying to find a plausible intersection between one’s background and skills, one’s interests and career aspirations, and what a company needs. For a generalist like me, this gets particularly interesting as I have a broad background scattered across several industries and career paths, with a corresponding lack of specialized skills. Because most companies post specialized positions, my resume is generally not a good match, and so it is up to me to frame my background and experience in such a way as to make me attractive to the company.

This framing reflects the fact that interviewing is a sales process, convincing a company that what they need is what you offer. At one extreme, one can go about this dishonestly, puffing up one’s resume and claiming accomplishments that were driven by others. At the other extreme, one can be lucky enough to be a perfect fit for what a company needs (eight years ago, Signature BioScience’s job listing for a software engineer matched my resume perfectly, right down to the physics background). But in most cases, the situation is somewhere in between (note the similarities to yesterday’s post about the need for companies to frame their brand for potential customers).

What most job candidates don’t realize is that it’s up to the candidate to sell the company on themselves as a match. When looking at a resume or cover letter, companies are looking for a reason to say no and reduce their options, so if they have to work to figure out how and why a candidate would be a match for the position, the application gets rejected. I struggled with this in my recent job search, trying to find positions where I could plausibly match up aspects of my background with the posted requirements for a job. So I had to put together a cover letter for each potential position that drew the appropriate connections between what I’ve done and what the company needed.

Making these connections between seemingly disconnected topics turns out to be a great application of my ability to look at things from multiple perspectives. I can look at a job opening from the company’s perspective, and emphasize the relevant skills I could bring to that job. One mistake that many candidates make is thinking that it’s important for them to list off all of their positive attributes in their interview or resume, as they are looking at things from their own perspective. What’s more effective is to list only the positive attributes that are relevant to the company, and finding a way to turn what could be perceived negatives into positives. My Columbia mentor emphasized the importance of following up every negative with a positive e.g. “Well, I have not done that specifically, but I have done these other tasks that are similar in these ways.”

One other interesting development during this job search was my realization that I have become more comfortable with my personal brand as a generalist. I can admit to myself that I am better at thinking across disciplines and considering the big picture than I am at specializing and making sure all the details are right, instead of trying to be good at everything. This was a negative with many potential jobs – companies want to be able to abstract away details by hiring a specialist to handle them. So I rejected jobs in software development and project management, as those moved me further away from my strengths and interests. At one point in my life, I would have been far more concerned about trying to build on my previous background, and molding myself to fit those types of jobs. Instead, I stuck to my generalist brand, explaining to companies that I was better at figuring out how the pieces fit together into a coherent whole than I was at doing any of the individual pieces. Not everybody sees the value of that, but the ones that do are likely to be better places for me.

This gets back to the idea of embracing a specific vision for a brand rather than trying to be everything to everybody. It also has helped me start to zero in on the things I want to be doing, rather than the things I am necessarily qualified to do at this time. Part of what I want is to spend more time on the types of issues I discuss on this blog. Part of it is becoming an advisor of sorts, bringing the people around me a fresh perspective on themselves and their issues. Part of it is being a connector, figuring out which ideas go together, and which people should be talking to each other. It’s still an inchoate vision, but I think my friends are starting to see where I’m going with this and helping me to shape that vision and my future. And it’s a virtuous circle, as people’s perceptions reinforce my vision of myself which continues to shape people’s perceptions.

Part of what’s been good about this job search is realizing what I don’t want to do; as I expressed a few weeks ago, a vision is as much to determine what not to do as it is to determine what should be done. It’s been frustrating for my friends in that they wanted to help me find a job, but I kept on rejecting ideas that they had as not being quite right without being able to concisely express what why their ideas weren’t right. Being able to have a better answer for the kind of work I wanted to do is part of what I’m trying to figure out with my personal brand.

It’s also difficult because most job searches start with what one has done previously and building on that, but I was looking for something different than what I’ve done before so that I could continue to broaden my experience. I was looking for positions where my eclectic and broad background was an asset rather than a liability. One of the reasons I liked the Google position is that it draws on all aspects of my career so far – my analytical skills from my physics days, my technical understanding from my development days, and my developing business and strategy skills from the last three years – while giving me a chance to add yet more skills to my toolbox.

Getting back to the idea of personal branding, the difficulty of branding is not just deciding what one stands for, but ensuring that one’s brand is successfully communicated to one’s target audience. In the interview process, one must frame one’s personal career brand (project manager, software developer, or generalist) as being what the company is looking to hire. If one were looking to date, it’s projecting an appropriate image to attract the desired demographic. This is a tricky process, and gets back to the questions of morality and truth that I touched upon briefly in yesterday’s post. Who are we really? And what does that question even mean if one takes the idea of multiple social identities seriously?

Another concept I mentioned in yesterday’s branding post is the idea of enlisting customers as advocates – what would this mean in personal branding? In the realm of job searching, I think this is just networking, enlisting friends and former coworkers to help one find a new job. We all have friends who are looking out for us, and looking for ways to help us move forward – these are our advocates of our personal brand, whatever it is.

I like the idea of a personal brand, mostly as a way of framing for myself the decisions I’m making about the type of career I’m currently pursuing, the kind of person I want to be, and how I convey those decisions to other people. It’s the same problem that companies face when trying to define who they are in the marketplace, so applying similar techniques to my life would probably be helpful.

So what’s your personal brand? How would you define yourself in one sentence?

I have been thinking about the topic of branding on and off since talking with Noah Brier a few months ago. Noah pointed out to me the dizzying concept that a company does not control its brand directly – the brand is whatever people think of the company. In other words, a company can claim whatever it wants to about itself, but the brand is whatever gets transmitted to people’s minds. Noah went on to illustrate this concept by creating BrandTags, a site where people are asked to enter the first word that comes to mind when seeing a corporate logo. While BMW might be happy that “luxury” and “quality” are common responses, they might be less happy that “asshole” is up there as well.

One of the challenges of today’s world is finding a way to get a coherent message out there. The world of mass media was simpler – a company could be reasonably assured that its brand message would be conveyed directly into potential customers’ perceptions. But in a world of user-generated context where the aggregate of people’s opinions is easily accessible, the company’s message is only one component in a sea of information about the company. For instance, when I’m thinking about buying a new book, I generally first go to Amazon, not to get the blurb from the book jacket, but to see what other customers thought of the book. The experience of other people with the book is far more meaningful to me than what the publisher might tell me.

Because a brand is only effective when it successfully transmits a message to people’s brains, it’s up to companies to find ways to more effectively get their message out. George Lakoff would call this framing – presenting the desired message in a form that makes it more likely to be accepted by the recipient. Ries and Trout would call it Positioning, making it clear what a product or company stands for. This is especially important as people have developed filtering mechanisms to ignore anything that smacks of blatant advertising.

This starts to get into tricky territory, though – at what point does framing become lying? There clearly has to be an authentic basis for claims made in the framing process, but leaving out information that a company deems irrelevant may undermine the credibility of other claims. I ponder this question often, as I have a knack for assembling sets of ideas to make sense for a given audience – an ability that would uncharitably be called spin doctoring, and could easily be seen as disregarding the concept of truth. At the same time, the foundation for much of my career success is this ability to consistently interpret and translate between different constituencies by finding the right analogies to emphasize what’s relevant to each side. It’s not necessarily the whole truth, but including every possibly relevant fact often makes things less clear. While constructing a clear and concise brand message, companies need to be aware of the misleading potential and provide some measure of transparency to customers to prevent accusations of dishonesty. But that’s another topic.

Building a brand these days is about creating a consistent experience that authentically reflects the experience of actual customers. The brand has to stand for something unique and compelling, and the company needs that message to be conveyed in every interaction between a customer and a company. Noah told me a story of how his previous agency convinced a client of the importance of this by calling their technical support line and asking the representative about the current marketing motto that was on billboards – the poor representative was just confused, but the marketing people got the message that branding is not contained only within marketing any more.

in the ideal case, the brand compels customers to become advocates, extolling the virtues of the brand to their friends and acquaintances. When a branding message is being trumpeted by both a company’s official PR mechanisms and its customers, the messages reinforce each other and create a synergistic effect that is far more powerful than either would be alone. For instance, when Ford ran its “Quality is Job 1″ ad campaign, it was somewhat undermined by people who joked that Ford stood for “Fix Or Repair Daily”. In an interesting twist, several successful companies now skip traditional advertising entirely, instead making the experience of their customers be the advertising; notable examples include Starbucks, Whole Foods, etc. This is partially a reflection of the cynicism of the day – American consumers have been lied to for decades by advertisers, so any corporate message is automatically discounted. Meanwhile, enthusiastic supporters of a brand can be far more credible, attracting similar people to the brand; this may backfire, though, as in the association of “asshole” with BMW.

To create a compelling brand that recruits customers as advocates, the brand has to stand for something specific. Trying to be everything to everybody means creating a mediocre product that won’t offend anybody, but also won’t make anybody into an advocate. Authors from Seth Godin to Kathy Sierra emphasize the idea that anything that certain people love, other people will hate. And that’s okay, because it’s better to inspire strong emotions and get people talking than it is to be boring and mediocre. For instance, Apple’s brand of elite hipsterism may turn off as many potential customers as it attracts, but its advocates rave about Apple products, creating a cult-like atmosphere.

Branding is a fascinating topic to me as it’s at the intersection of several fields of interest. Branding is building bridges between a company and the minds of its potential customers, which depends on psychology and communication, product design, and customer experience. It overflows traditional company divisions and traditional spheres of influence. It is a gestalt construct, where every little interaction contributes to the whole, and one discordant element can destroy the whole construct. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of topic that appeals to a generalist like me, so expect to see a few more posts on this topic at some point.

P.S. I’m hosting a happy hour this Thursday (August 14th) at Bar 13 at 35 E. 13th St near Union Square. I’ll be there at 5:30 or so, and should be around for a couple hours. Stop on by if you’re interested.