Purple Gain

Sincere mourning or more pall than we can bear?

Prince passed away on April 21 of this year.

It was a sad but remarkable day, wasn’t it? Remarkable in the way that the feelings of shock and loss were very nearly universal. People who hadn’t realized how much they enjoyed the Paisley Park sound were suddenly and sadly aware: We were all Prince’s fans, and none of us were ready to see him go.

Prince was an extraordinarily talented performer, who’d wielded outsized influence on pop culture since the early 1980s. This is perhaps why his death felt so much like a watershed, a moment in time, indelibly marked. WWE personality Chyna passed away the day before, and we lost Merle Haggard just a couple weeks earlier. Both events were notably sad, yet neither somehow felt as ground-shifting as Prince’s death. Prince himself would have been unlikely to claim that his life was worth anything more or less than anyone else’s, yet his death was more of a world-wide event, felt by all.

There’s a tendency, maybe even a need, to reach out during such events. Always has been. The difference now is that we have the ability to reach out much more quickly, to a much wider audience. Another consequential development is that businesses, corporations, and brands share that ability, and they tend to exercise it with the same kind of individualized voice as do the rest of us.

Which is generally a positive thing–we’ve examined before the value of vibrant social-media brand presence. It’s fairly straightforward in ordinary times. But in extraordinary circumstances, such as the death of an icon, some brands perform better than others.

Our vigilant friends at Adweek did a roundup of the best and worst brand tributes to Prince; we won’t rehash it here except to say the companies that temporarily purpled their mascots, or tweeted some shaky connection between Prince and their product, did themselves no favors. The ones that emulated the millions of regular people who took to social media simply to share their grief were on the mark.

Brand social-media presence is about selling, sure. If it were only about that, though, we’d replace the retweet link with a “Buy Now” button. The true, overarching goal is to make connections and engage in conversations. People connect with brands in which they detect a relatable human face. This means being entertaining, informative, and approachable on a day to day basis, and being solemnly empathetic when the worst happens.

Look at it this way. If a great tsunami were to wipe out a major city, causing unspeakable loss of life, would you try to slip in there and leverage it for a promotional opportunity? Most of us wouldn’t but don’t be naive, plenty would. Assuming you’re one of the good ones and would never contemplate such a thing, that same sense of social conscience is all you need to guide your social-media presence. The analogy works because every death is a tidal wave for someone.

There aren’t many hard and fast rules in marketing, and the rules that exist are frequently broken. We could tell you that your social-media activity should be something like 70 percent conversational, 30 percent promotional. Maybe that’s the right mix for you, maybe it’s not.

But we’ll stake our reputations on one absolute and irrevocable rule, which we’ll never break and we’ll encourage all others to follow faithfully: Do not market on the back of a tragedy. It’s doesn’t just look bad, it is bad. And the damage it does to your business does not compare to that done to your very humanity.

The C4:

1. It’s been long postulated that tragedies bring out the best and the worst. We can all testify to the truth of this in terms of social media. In the worst of times most of us go online to discuss and console and commiserate. And then there are those other people.

2. Corporate and brand social-media presences are rarely offensive on purpose. Usually, in the worst cases, they’re merely tone deaf. They’re driven to leverage their presence for self-promotion, and they’re liable to do so at the most inappropriate times. People notice this, and their resentment lingers.

3. Promotion has its place and its time. That time is not when people are grieving. At times like those forget about selling, and just be another voice in the conversation. Or stay quiet.

4. This harsh lesson comes our way from a death we still mourn, and really are still trying to process. Rest in peace, Prince. You gave us decades of fantastic music, and we appreciate it, but we know now it wasn’t nearly enough.

The Most Interesting Lawsuit in the World

Staying thirsty has been numero uno since 2006.

The judge stands when he enters the courtroom. Opposing counsel submit motions to recognize his coolness. He brings his own gavel, and no one minds when he uses it.

He doesn’t always drink beer, he doesn’t always fly to Mars, and he doesn’t always file suit. But when he does any of these things, he makes them very interesting. 

He’s the most interesting TV pitchman in the world. His name is Jonathan Goldsmith, but you have known him as the dashing, silver-bearded guru who called you his friend, and encouraged you to stay thirsty. His 10-year, wildly successful run as Dos Equis Beer’s Most Interesting Man in the World recently wrapped. He left, epic as ever, on a one-way solo mission (he made it look more like a jaunt) to Mars. It was a compelling end to an awesome ad campaign, but the question must be asked: Was the iconic character allowed to fade away gracefully, or was he forced out due to a rancorous series of lawsuits and countersuits lobbed between Goldsmith and his erstwhile talent agency?

Like many a nasty breakup, this one has a fiscal component. The agency, Gold-Levin Talent, allege that they haven’t received their contractual commissions from Mr. Goldsmith’s work since 2014. Goldsmith retorts that Barbara Buky, the agent who landed him the Dos Equis gig, never worked for the agency in question, and she’s in fact now married to Mr. Goldsmith (how could she possibly say no to his proposal?). His countersuit contends that the agency violated a confidentiality clause, and damaged his reputation by disclosing elements of his contract.

Heineken USA, owners of Dos Equis, called the legal contretemps, “a personal matter for Jonathan that does not concern” the brand. Off the record, and before the announcement that the campaign was ending, sources close to the company struck a cautious note, saying that since the legal fight is a business matter only, not a “salacious lawsuit,” they were holding out hope against any brand blowback.

Just weeks later The Most Interesting Man was on his way, some might say exiled, to Mars.

Although it seemed at first that the brand was standing by their Interesting Man, it very well could be that the suit and countersuit (and more importantly, the press thereby generated) was an unacceptable risk. These brand managers, like most, are smart enough not to buy into the dubious “any publicity is good publicity” theory (just ask Chipotle how accurate that trope is).

Under the circumstances, and given that in a lot of people’s minds Jonathan Goldsmith is Dos Equis, they’ve probably made the right call. But the position they found themselves in demonstrates the lurking peril hiding deep inside every successful advertising campaign: Associating your brand too closely with any one person, place, or idea means that your brand rises and falls with the fortunes of the same.

The C4:

Uno. Actor Jonathan Goldsmith represented Dos Equis beer as The Most Interesting Man in the World from 2006 to 2016. It has been one of the most successful TV advertising campaigns of the 21st century, and has made Goldsmith’s character one of the most recognizable in modern pop culture.

Dos. What could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a lot, actually. Dos Equis hitched its wagon to Goldsmith’s star (it’s usually the other way around in advertising). Once the brand was indelibly linked with the visage and personality of The Most Interesting Man, any negative publicity for him equaled negative publicity for them.

Tres. And not to be terribly insensitive, but the incomparable Mr. Goldsmith is in his late seventies. Lawsuit or no, could the campaign have gone on much longer? Had it not ended gracefully, would the future have brought us a parade of comedians in fake beards reprising the role, a la KFC and Colonel Sanders? Good lord, no.

Quatro. This curtain call for The Most Interesting Man might have come in the form of some testy lawsuits between an actor and his talent agency. It’s the sort of thing that happens all the time, and amounts to little more than a pixel or two in the big, big picture. But it was news, and that starkly demonstrates how easily one person can come to stand for an entire brand. Let that be a lesson to all of us who’d try to tame the twin beasts of brand management and public opinion. 

Adios, amigo. The cerveza won’t taste quite the same without you.

A New Impression of Renoir

The Power of Crowdsourced Evaluations

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 - 1919) was one of the most famous artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is considered one of the founders of the French Impressionist movement. His paintings form the cornerstones of some of the most prestigious modern-art collections, including those at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the British National Gallery, and the Louvre.

We might think it safe, then, to assume that a noble and enduring legacy has been sealed for the artist who once said,

“The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”

But...no. Renoir could turn a phrase, but a small, very vocal minority is convinced, and they want us all to know, that Renoir sucked at painting.

And this sentiment isn’t lukewarm; it isn’t mildly griped about over wine and arrays of fine cheeses. Oh no. This has brought people into the streets.

Renoir Sucks At Painting (they’re so angry with the man they’re still slagging him in the present tense) is perhaps the most fervent art-critique movement of our lifetimes. It is the brainchild of citizen-critic Max Geller, who sparked the revolt on Instagram before it morphed  into an IRL picket-line phenomenon.

“Aesthetic terrorism,” is how RSAP partisans refer to the various Renoir collections. Actually, that’s one of their more civil epithets. The somewhat less generous “empty calorie-laden steaming piles” has also been voiced.

As a prolific Impressionist pioneer, Renoir did indeed develop a distinctive, unconventional style. We’ll leave it to others to determine whether that style deserves veneration or Geller-esque vitriol.

What we’ll comment upon, instead, is the supremacy of perceived value. And actually, that qualifier is almost redundant: Value is always perceived. Renoir is a Very Important Artist, whose paintings regularly sell in the eight-figure range, because popular perception has made it so. The same is true for Monet, Manet, and Matisse. And the same principle explains why it feels about right to pay two bucks for a tube of toothpaste, and twenty grand for a new car.

Consumer revolt has a place in this paradigm, as a way of counteracting the tendency for costs to outpace value. Toothpaste vendors would love to hike their per-tube profit, but shoppers will stand for only so much of that. Value disintegrates just as soon as consumers decide that the worth of the product is no longer equal to their dollars spent.

Few of us will ever shell out for a Renoir original, at whatever going rate they might be fetching. But it’s important to understand we still, nonetheless, contribute to Renoir’s valuation. Our patronage at museums, purchases of reproductions, even our opinions and discourses in the public spaces will help determine whether Renoir’s body of work maintains a lofty spot in art hierarchy, or is relegated to the level of flea-market Elvis-on-black-velvet.

Max Geller and his boisterous band of Renoir haters may or may not succeed in pulling poor old Pierre-Auguste from his posthumous pedestal, but they’re determined to make their voices heard. And in doing so, they’re reminding us all that value, or lack thereof, remains a decision we make together.


The C4:
1. Renoir Sucks at Painting. Or does he? This is infinitely subjective but you wouldn’t know it by checking out the collections of the world’s major art museums. Curators seem to have made our choice for us: Renoir rocks.

2. But for every dictum, let there be backlash. Max Geller looked at Renoir, and did not like what he saw. Others agreed. They groused online, then moved outdoors. Anti-Renoir demonstrations raged earlier this year on the steps of museums in Boston and New York.

3. Beyond art and aesthetics, this is about value. Renoir paintings have sold for as much as $78 million. This can only be so because a critical mass of consumers believe Renoir is worth that kind of dough. Should Geller’s fellow-travelers reach a comparable mass, then your average Renoir will be worth its weight in garden mulch.

4. So where do we stand? As always, we honor and respect popular opinion. We salute Max Geller and his folk for their commitment, yet we understand and appreciate Renoir’s importance in art history. That said, he sure did make this kid look funny, didn’t he?

Does This Ring A Bell?

Don't shoot yourself in the foot just before inserting it into the mouth.

 

Brands have stopped talking at us. That alone is a wondrous leap forward in how marketing gets done.

The fact that brands are now talking with us is not so much an intentional branding evolution, as it is the direction that contemporary technology has taken us all. Living in the digital age means instant and nearly unlimited communication. Three billion of us are online now, and each of us has more or less equal access to this ongoing global conversation.

That might spell cacophony, and it often does, but compelling voices sometimes rise above the din. Beautiful people (and beautiful brands) seem to have a natural advantage here–an out sized body of social-media followers that hangs on their every post. But the rest of us—people and brands perhaps a bit less gorgeous—can duly earn notice and global attention, fleeting though it might be.

And there are no occult tricks to this; just be timely, topical, interesting, or witty. If possible, be all the above.

The truly remarkable thing is that these rules-of-thumb are universal – they apply as equally to you and your Twitter-tantrums as they do to the massive cross-platform social-media feeds of the the world’s biggest, brassiest brands.

So how does that play out? There’s literally no limit to the possibilities...but one fascinating trend we’re tracking is the wacky online cross-talk between brands, and some irreverent interactions between brands and consumers.

The brief exchange of Tweeted one-liners between Old Spice and Taco Bell screen-capped above is one of our favorites–they each say their bit, we all laugh, and that's that. The interplay seems a little edgy, a little snarky–but look closer. Doesn't that banter seem more like a bit of verbal horseplay between two old friends?

It surely helps, of course, that the participants here aren’t competitors. We haven’t seen much online interaction between direct rivals, because the results would be predictably ugly. Brand managers rightfully keep a pretty tight rein on social-media messaging, and they know that any posts or exchanges that can be construed as petty or whiny will turn people off. Some small, voyeuristic minority of us might enjoy watching a real-time flame-war between big-brand adversaries, but the rest would disgustedly will a pox on both their houses.

Because fun is fun, and edginess can be entertaining, but at the end of the day it is adult behavior we respect and admire. Big brands, celebs, and even we little folk can log on and quip and banter all day long, and there’s no small chance we can gain some notice in doing so. But doing so in the manner of a petulant child is bound to bring notice we never wanted, and will never be able to erase.

The C4:
1. The ways in which marketing communication has changed in our lifetimes is voluminous (feel free to scroll through a few dozen C4 pages for an ongoing enumeration). But perhaps the most exciting aspect is the phenomenon of reciprocity. Twentieth-century advertising was unidirectional: from the marketer’s megaphone directly into your brain. In the 21st century we have conversations.

2. We’re well into our second decade of this new reality now, and behold the unintended consequences: brands have voices that are instantaneous and under constant observation. Their social-media presences can and do pump out unedited content 24/7. The results can be marvelous, or they can be analogous to shooting one’s foot right before inserting it into one’s mouth.

3. We’ve gone on record advocating for civility and constructive behavior in online discourse. Consider this our corollary: Boorish banter is brand suicide.

4. But highbrow, clever banter? Bring it on. Any conversation is a bit brighter with a few well-wrought quips thrown in. Think you’ve got some of that to add to the planetary chat? Then by all means do so, and reap your due rewards.

S-S-Sellin' To My Generation

Divergent Pitches to Boomers, Xers and Millenials

The more things change...

Generational divides are nothing new. But they’ve never been as problematic for marketers as they are now.


Back when TV was black-and-white and “doctors” pitched cigarettes during Uncle Miltie’s commercial breaks, selling was simple: just follow the money. The money was in the hands of dad and mom, who were resolutely suburban, and invariably aged 30-45. Look back on the ad campaigns of the day, and you’ll see that the vast majority of them were targeted laser-like at this precise demographic.

Oh, but how times have changed. Advertisers must still follow the money, but that money has dispersed beyond all expectation. Three distinct generations–boomers, Xers, and millennials–are holding purse-strings these days, and sellers are making divergent, concerted pitches for all three.

There are of course no limits to the ways of doing that, but it’s interesting to note that one method in particular is being used across that entire spectrum: an appeal to nostalgia.

We’ve told you recently about brands from the baby boomers’ yesteryears being brought back for profitable reprises.

But nostalgia, it seems, has no definable shelf-life, and marketers seem willing to leverage ever more recent memories in hopes of moving product.

If you, for instance, loved the Eighties then MillerCoors is betting you’ll also love its retro Miller Lite packaging, last seen in stores in the late 1970s. For over a year now they’ve been re-dressing their premier low-cal beer in the same cans and bottles they wore when introduced way back in 1972. The beer itself hasn’t changed––Miller Lite is still brewed according to the same recipe used since day one. It’s the packaging alone that has evolved, then devolved, all in the name of nostalgia.

And nostalgia can be even more late-model than that; here’s one for the millennials. Coca-Cola is reintroducing Surge, an iconic ‘90s-era citrus concoction that disappeared a mere 12 years ago. For many of us that’s hardly enough time to have even noticed it was gone.

We may scoff, but in the end the proof of all these gambits will be in the pudding. If consumers are buying, then selling to their nostalgia must be an efficacious idea. But it seems to us there has to be a point of diminishing returns here. If not, then we can only take this strategy to the extreme: Once any product starts to falter, just take it off the shelves for a few weeks, then bring it back to great fanfare and shouts of “You missed us, right?!”

Let nostalgia be true nostalgia, is all we’re saying. Forcing it, especially before its due time, seems desperate and desperately artificial. Consumers might not be seeing it this way...yet. But trust us, if this hand is overplayed consumers will notice and they’ll start equating commercial nostalgia with distasteful manipulation.

And hey, it’s not like there aren’t alternatives. There’s one time-tested method for winning over any buyer of any age: offer them what they want, with quality and value. That’s a selling proposition that a boomer, an Xer, and a millennial can truly get nostalgic over.

The C4:
1. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are now 75.4 million baby boomers, 82.1 million generation Xers, and 83.1 million millennials. That’s 240.6 million adult (or young adult) consumers. Marketers are tasked with endeavoring to steer that consumption.

2. But marketing requires a targeted approach, and your approach might vary if your target is 18 versus 80.

3. It is certainly not out of bounds to appeal to nostalgia. Emotion, after all, is an aspect of the buying decision, and nostalgia is emotional. But can it be overused? Maybe so. When we start turning yesterday’s fad into tomorrow’s nostalgia, then definitely so.

4. When in doubt, just remember that each of those 240.6 million consumers are looking for value, and expecting to be treated with dignity and respect. There’s no magic bullet or killer app in honest marketing–there is only the unassailable recognition that the buyer is the boss.