AT's Approach

Are values solely the domain of the client? The brand?

Watch this video. Maybe not new to many of you, but important.

I can’t ever remember hearing about the agencies responsible for this kind of work coming under criticism. Can somebody point me to an instance? Because I’m wondering why. Is it wrong to keep the agencies responsible for this stuff out scrutiny? Why are they immune from criticism? Can’t they say no to the work?

Arthur Anderson wasn’t exactly excused in the Eron’s misdeeds.

Values matter. We make decisions based on them. Those decisions create good, spread ideas, move us forward. Or they contribute to the dynamics in our world we know aren’t of value.

I bet that there’re more than a few agencies who’ve turned down work like this. I’d love to hear their stories. Where can you search for Not Agency of Record? I’d like to get inspired by the work of those kinds of agencies. Not these.

Let’s get to the simple side of complexity. Try this on for size, fellow branding geeks.

Branding happens in three stages:

1. What you think you’re gonna get
2. What you actually get
3. What you’re gonna do about it

Building a brand is about asking and answering three questions:

1. What do I/we do well?
2. How I/do we do it differently?
3. Why does it matter?

And managing a brand is about one thing:

1. Inspiring a shared vision.

Will that work?

Feelin all rainbow-y today.

I nursed a cold in front of the TV Friday night. Given the election season in Colorado, this was an exercise for the mute button.

I wonder how it would feel knowing you’ve achieved something in your life by primarily bringing down the competition instead of proving your own worth? Would you consider that an achievement?

This, even more than the general nastiness of the ads, was depressing. Due to the onslaught of negativity, I’m feeling a strange urge to contribute something positive to the morass. My part to counter the vibe as it were. After all, there so many more people dedicated to (as a client of mine put it) staying focused on the we’ve never been here before as opposed to the this isn’t working.

People with a profound awareness of this reality are all around me. I’m a lucky guy. A few examples from the work side of my life that’s keeping me hopeful:

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Not that anyone who knows me or reads this blog (both of you) needs another rant about people who rant about the stupid and irritating client. I’ve done that before.

But I was recently face-to-face with a few consultants and business owners who’ve motivated to write a bit more about this. I not sure why this is still in my craw, but here it is.

If your client isn’t doing something that is painfully obvious to you, it’s a sign that your client has a leadership maturity to be admired. That you know about their stupid actions or doltish inactions at all – that is, that they called you in the first place – is a signal that they realize they have a weakness and are serious enough in what they do to put their ego aside and call in someone to help.

Would that it were me.

We shouldn’t be dismayed or amazed at what they aren’t doing or don’t know. I’m quite sure that every one of us would seem like a child in the presence of certain experts who’d point out our inadequacies and how dangerously close to the edge we are in either missing a huge opportunity or screwing something up for good. An intellectual property lawyer (that image on my blog isn’t Creative Commons licensed?), a leadership expert (there’s more to social capital beyond my Twitter follower count?), an accountant (I can’t defend that in an audit?), a finance strategist (a traunch? leveraged growth?), an employment lawyer (I can get sued for that?), an innovation consultant (innovation is a discipline, not just big ideas?).

I for one am exceedingly unimpressed by a consultant who asks me to be astonished at their stupid client. Yeah, I get that. They called you, right?

It’s much more fulfilling to have a conversation with someone who’s willing to share how they went about solving the problem. And maybe even admiring the client for calling them in the first place.

Albums - not just for the music.

I’ll say it: Effective participation in the social web is hard. Damn hard.

It requires strategic acumen more akin to leadership (valuing social capital and investing in the necessary competencies to build and leverage it) and execution skills more akin to in-person networking (add value to those you want to reach and do it all the time) than any kind of marketing and communications discipline.

It isn’t free. It isn’t fast. And the worst time to build your social web presence is at the beginning of a campaign, a crisis, or any other time when you want to broadcast and promote.

It’s exactly the same as this truism: The worst time to build a real-life network is when you want a job. Or a sale. Or anything at all. Social systems sniff out those who are out for themselves. They can detect them like a gas leak. And they’ll leave your house posthaste.

So how do you demonstrate the value of the social web in a culture with competing priorities?

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Only a few days after my post on branding re-framed as leadership (which had a short stab at personal branding) my lodestar on this topic Doc Searls linked to a few more posts that he (and now I) found apropos.

I wanted to point people to this one in particular because (a) I love it, and (b) I agree. Big kudos to you, Maureen Johnson. (And you should have whispered it, btw.) We are not brands. We are, indeed, weird. And layered. And multitudinous.

I’m actually working through a brand platform for a client that pivots around an eclectic, multi-layered experience. I turn to New Belgium Brewery as a model for this – a great brand that captures their layered experience. It can be done.

But people aren’t experiences. We experience. People aren’t work. We work.

And people aren’t results. People aren’t products. People aren’t services. We make, and yes, brand those things.

Is branding really worth saving?

Branding (not product branding, but that enterprise-level notion of name and reputation we’re still wrestling with) is dying because we’ve run it into the ground. If you asked anyone or anything to wear as many hats, mean as many things, or be a placeholder for so many musings as contradictory (think tactics promoted as strategy), impertinent (think one-size-fits-all-contexts theories), and importance-inflated (the genocide in Rwanda is an element of a brand? Really?) as we ask of branding, it’d die too. From sheer exhaustion.

It’s not the years (to paraphrase Indiana Jones). It’s the mileage.

Branding started as a notion of something you could control. If you had the resources to overcome the complexity of making fires and casting iron, you could mark something with a fair degree of inspiration, but without much thought of listening to anyone else’s opinion on the matter. Here it is. Our brand.

Branding today is obviously different. So much so that it’s sort of turned inside of itself. It’s lost its way. What branding has become in the last five years or so is actually a re-brand of good leadership practices. Let me make that case.

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There are new bedfellows in the world of communications.

I had an interesting week of facilitating workshops and guest lecturing. Standing in front of people and trying to add value – acting like (as my late uncle used to say) I knew what I was doing.

Two key takeaways from the week of acting like I knew what I was doing:

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Paul Hawken could have used his time at the Denver Sustainable Industries Economic Forum to talk about anything. And he covered a fairly wide variety of topics.

But what stood out was his reminder that “people want to play in the fun sandbox.” That sustainable solutions to business and our world should be joyful. Think of the innovation that’s going on in this space, he challenged us. The amazing technology. System-changing ideas. Massive shifts in the status quo. The wondrous problems about to be solved. The human spirit and joy behind it all.

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Like the artwork around its vats, the New Belgium brand is made up of many individual parts, while well considered and considerately crafted.

Craft beer on a Wednesday afternoon. One of the perks of working for yourself.

OK, so we didn’t drink beer. But a prospective client and I spent the better part of the day visiting the New Belgium brewery in Ft. Collins, Colorado yesterday. I’m recommending some branding initiatives for this prospective client, and New Belgium provides an excellent analog to what we’re after. (We’ll see where it goes.)

The New Belgium brand is special on many fronts. But one dynamic we saw first-hand stuck out above all the others.

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