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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

marketing

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The costs of faking it

From above a tan-skinned person in shorts and sneakers looks at a white phone. Another leg is visible on the bottom right of the photo.
Photo credit: Kate Serbin

“Fake it til you make it” was one of the many mantras of personal development and motivation in the 1980s.

It was probably one of the most enduring pieces of poor life advice.

“Nosedive,” an episode from the surrealist Netflix series Black Mirror, pushes “faking it” to the limit. Whereas in our reality, economic credit makes the world turn, in the world of “Nosedive,” social media ratings are like currency, popular influencers are like the 1%, and reputation management consultants are like credit repair specialists.

One character grimaces while composing the perfect photo of her coffee. It tastes terrible, but her photo caption will never say that. “No one is this happy,” another character warns her.

And she brushes him off because she’s more committed to playing the idealization game than to sharing her actual life, opinions, or perspectives with others.

If the consequences of inauthenticity were as direct and vivid in real life as they are in this episode, fewer people would build their lives around it. But there are some rewards for editing out fragments of a whole life thanks to social media and last century’s innovations in public relations.

Whoever shapes their public face first and best seems to win. However, audiences and consumers alike are easily aroused to suspicion: if there’s any gap between the presented and the actual, we’ll eventually find it and crack it open.

It’s one of the ironies of the open internet that the more we’re trained to share about ourselves, the less we believe of each other. As we learn to apply hermeneutics of suspicion not just to ideologies but to other people and their intentions on- and offline, there’s not much room left for trust.

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Learning about character from Shakespeare

On a jet black background, a pink-to-purple rose. The lighting highlights the color of the flower and deep shadow. The flower is lit from the bottom left.
Photo credit: Simone Dalmeri

In William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet muses about the conflict between her family, the Capulets, and the family of her beloved, Romeo. The two families are feuding and she’s been trained to hate the name “Montague,” yet she’s still managed to fall in love with someone from that clan.

Jul. O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father, and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet…

’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself though, not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O! be some other name:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.” —Romeo and Juliet, Act II, sc. ii

Romeo, who’s been eavesdropping out of sight until this point in the scene, tells Juliet that he’d abandon his name if he could because of her antipathy for it.

The phrase that’s passed into common English: That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Shakespeare was partially right: the substance of a thing is still its substance no matter what it’s called.

But marketing rests on the fact that we don’t always accurately perceive substance when its branding or marketing points us to something different. When the name of a thing misdirects us, that affects our perceptions of it. And when there’s a mismatch between a thing’s “name” or self-declaration and its actual nature, there are only negative feelings.

Back in the 1990s, three or four major soda companies tried a “clear cola” experiment, and soda drinkers just wouldn’t latch on. Coca Cola’s Tab Clear made it just two years in the UK and US. It had as much caffeine as classic and diet Coke did, and it was just as flavorful.

But Coca Cola sold the drink under one of its down-quality product lines, and they positioned it to tank a Pepsi competitor. To consumers, it wasn’t Coke enough: A cola by another name and color didn’t taste as sweet.

In the aftermath of the US federal election, Evangelicals including Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne have worried that the Evangelical brand is so corrupted that they can no longer use it. “Jesus-centered faith needs a new name,” Campolo and Claiborne wrote in the New York Times, arguing that the community once known as Evangelical needed to shed its sociopolitical baggage and its association with the 45th President and the Republican Party.

Other writers have pushed back hard on Campolo and Claiborne’s attempt to dissociate, but the core issue Evangelicals face today is the same one Shakespeare explored through Juliet and Romeo:

People are susceptible to Madison Avenue’s psychological marketing techniques, and we wrestle with the distances between the substance of a person, product, service, or community and whichever associations its marketers and brand strategists promote. When character and name or experience and brand are at odds, we notice. No one likes false advertising and expectations that aren’t met, but we do like to be pleasantly surprised, to have our expectations exceeded.

The lesson from this could be the simple dictum “under-promise and over-deliver.” But perhaps a better lesson is that in religion and in relationship we should rather focus on the health of our characters and the quality of our contributions. No matter what people call it, a rose only smells sweet when it is fresh. No marketing campaign, even on Madison Avenue, can cover up the stink of rancid flowers or the disappointment of a clear soda.

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Investments and charitable giving

piggyInvesting and charitable giving are two different ways for someone with resources to contribute to an organization or cause.

I’ve conflated them in the past, but recently read an article advising people not to.

In Market Watch, Berman, Barasch, Levine, and Small explain that people give when they feel emotionally connected to a cause, not necessarily because they’ve demonstrated that the cause will turn a profit or be financially productive. Nonprofit watchdogs like Guidestar and GiveWell (mentioned in the article) allow organizations to share much more about program outcomes and financial reports. Yet all that extra information may not change anything about how donors actually give.

On the one hand, no one wants their charitable donations to go to waste, and effectiveness information could help people avoid low-impact charities.

On the other hand, ‘going with the numbers’ may not align with the causes people are drawn to support, and those causes are often what motivates people to give in the first place.

For instance, many feel a deep commitment towards their local community. Yet eliminating suffering in the developing world is often much cheaper and can help many more people for the same price.”

According to these writers, donors don’t seem too concerned about the impact of their dollar when they’ve already emotionally bonded with the organization they’re giving to.

So perhaps fiscal transparency is like a seatbelt: it only matters to the people on board when something important has already gone wrong.

Read more: “Why we resist treating charities like investments,” MarketWatch (8/22/2016).

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The price of the purple cow

A black sesame burger bun filled with regular colored burger and toppings.
Photo: Burger King’s novelty black burgers, via CBS

Seth Godin, who posts thoughts on marketing, value, and originality on his blog every day, published the book Purple Cow back in 2003. Online marketing hadn’t yet peaked then but web marketers were already challenging conventional advice about how businesses should map out and manage their public-facing communication, influence and impact, and reputation.

Purple Cow is a manifesto about building “remarkable” products and businesses. So many business writers still refer to it more than a decade later, and its title is enough to prove its thesis: we remember products that distinguish themselves and we stick with makers who demonstrate value over time.

The Godin book I read a few years ago is Linchpin (2010), which applies Purple Cow‘s principles to people. Linchpins distinguish themselves professionally with exceptional contributions over the long haul. Their contributions aren’t about whether they’re part-time or full-time, staff or contractors. Being a linchpin, for Godin, is about transforming common labor into art and recognizing that whatever our roles in a system, we can use our skills to reinforce human connection and to produce change. We don’t need to be system-authorized to do any of that.

For about a decade, attention has flowed to the purple cow, the linchpin, the innovator, and the disruptor. It’s nice to be thought original and exceptional, and there are still many rewards for being “first,” even if, like Burger King (US)’s novelty black burgers, your change doesn’t last. (Those burgers, which McDonalds pioneered, did just fine in Japan even if they flopped over here.)

But what happens to the ordinary in the meantime? Maintainers and sustainers don’t get awards in the way that innovators do, so does elevating the purple cows mean we must devalue the brown ones?

Surely not. Change still depends on stability, and even as we work to birth the new, we get to keep stewarding what already exists. I work with a lot of people who have strong visions for social change and improvement, and in some cases that change vision is quite radical. But even those groups demonstrate concern for conserving what’s good and building on what still needs developing.

Departures from the past aren’t quite as large as opponents perceive them to be, and it’s that continuity that builds a bridge from the “is” to the “could be.” Whether we’re cogs in a social machine or truly remarkable artists is ultimately not the most important thing. What matters is whether the amazing, rare experiences we know how to design can ever escape the sabbath, the holiday, or the weekend and take root in the regular hours of our lives.

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On Branding

This morning I came across a few links on the U.S. Republican Party’s post-election re-branding conversation.* This conversation has been going on for the last three months, and while a new “Growth and Opportunity Committee” has formed to move it forward, the recurring themes are still the same:

“The conservative message sells,” said Saul Anuzis, the former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party. “We’re on the right side of history, on the right side of the issues. We just haven’t done a very good job on articulating the issues.” (Yahoo)

“We have to build better relationships in minority communities, urban centers, college towns,” [Reince] Priebus said. “We need a permanent, growing presence.”
Priebus’ co-chair, Sharon Day, who was also re-elected, made the same point in a lighter way. “I will talk to a head of lettuce if I can get them to vote Republican,” she said. (NPR)

“Democrats are doing better among voters who can be considered the future. Republicans are doing well among those who could be described as the pre-dead… For Republicans who want their party to do more than simply hold a majority of the House—particularly those who hope to gain more than just one-third of the governing responsibility—the GOP needs to stop digging holes and start filling some in.” (Gov Exec | National Journal)

Simply said: It’s patronizing to brand as “change” a revision of tone with no revision of content. Apparent welcome without substantial welcome just isn’t attractive except to the audience already served by the status quo or sympathetic to it.

If you’re at a crossroads and wish to reach beyond the status quo, consider the following four principles:

  1. Good Branding is Based on Nature: Brand yourself as something you’re not, and you’ll read false and lose credibility. Brand yourself before you’ve defined what you are, and you’ll read false and lose credibility. Branding has to be congruent with your nature. Even branding myths have to be grounded in something; for example, don’t promote yourself as an innovation center if you haven’t created anything new in a decade.
  2. Share In Context: Design outreach work assuming that the information you self-declare will only be one part of the evolving narrative about you. Your audience has Google and other resources at its disposal and will use them to validate what you’ve said about yourself and others in the past. Depending on the situation, validation or invalidation can happen while you’re speaking. So remember that you haven’t emerged ex nihilo, out of nothing. You have a context; any outreach you do going forward will always be part of that; and, most importantly, there are people in your audience who will never forget your past successes or missteps. Acknowledging your background and the lessons you’ve learned is a lot wiser than obscuring your background or constructing faux history for yourself or your movement.
  3. First Plant the Roses; Then Pick Them: Do the majority of your work before you start marketing. Clear, consistent definition, reckoning with audience-relevant values, providing reliable services — these are all things that need to precede a branding campaign, not follow it. Only once you’ve matched your offerings to what constituents value can you gain and sustain their attention and support: no sense in seeking the rewards if you haven’t already created valued products, resources, services, or expertise. Mere existence is not enough.
  4. At Every Stage, Be Responsive: Responsiveness includes connecting, listening, and adapting with constituents, not just reacting to them. Groups that adapt with their constituents don’t get left behind. Groups that refuse to adapt with constituents, especially because “We’re right, and our constituents just don’t know it yet!” do get left behind, and deserve to be.

I share these and similar observations when talking with religious marketers, ministers, and social activists: as Eric Hoffer observed more than 60 years ago, movements share some enduring features regardless of their ideologies or the groups that support them. To merely function, groups and movements need to sustain members’ allegiance to doctrines and commitment to programs, but to flourish, they need much, much more than steady membership drives or new demographic targets.

What have you noticed helps groups and movements to flourish? In your experience, what role does branding strategy play?

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* This post is based on a extended tweet series from this morning; join me on Twitter for content like this.