steve is a blog is a blog

Resonance is cool. Discomfort is cooler.

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 10:07:00 -0500

John Maus, the synthpop-craftsman-turned-philosophy-professor, has a complicated relationship with performing live. As he explains in an interview with Bombsite.com, he sees the live setting as a way to bring together fans in one big celebration, but also as an opportunity to pose some fundamental questions about the place of “live performance” in music and in society.

How does he pose these questions? By refusing to use a live band. By letting his studio recordings play behind him exactly as they appear on his albums. And by making no effort at creating the illusion that his backing tracks are anything but recordings. He sometimes sings along, sometimes forgets, usually just sort of screams a bunch. And when you watch the video above, it’s pretty clear that all of this makes much of his audience noticeably uncomfortable.

When we talk about media, especially branding and advertising, we often talk about resonance. The idea that cultural products succeed when they “resonate” with a mass audience, when they reach out to a whole lot of people and tickle a core part of their being. Usually when folks mention resonance, it’s discussed as a harmonic thing. Desires and cultural products meshed together in beautiful unison.

But what if we understand our audience so thoroughly that we know which parts of their worldviews are shaky, which parts can be questioned and probed and provoked? Then we can create something more powerful than resonance the way most folks understand it. We can skip harmony altogether. We can create discomfort.

I’ve quoted some of the interview here:

“I’ve tossed [around the idea of playing with a live band] but I think that there is … I still really feel that there is something more interesting in the way that I’ve been doing it. It’s too bad that some people are really rubbed the wrong way by it. It’s not the intention whatsoever. I think it speaks to performing in a more accurate way. It’s objective in that sense that of representing the world as it stands. Some guy asked me in a magazine, what was it, about Brittney Spears at the VMAs or something, about that moment when the karaoke went haywire or something. This has happened on Saturday Night Live and stuff, when the lip sync goes off and everyone is just stupefied because the curtain is lifted and the heart of the situation that has opened up before that is just … and they have no idea how to behave and no idea how to act because the things that control all of that are gone, suspended for a moment. Something like that is what I’m after perhaps.

What is a live performance about? I mean this live situation has been interrogated in so many ways, by theater, avant-garde theater and experimental music. Pop music—punk rock—hasn’t asked very many interesting questions about the live situation. Perhaps it could. Is it about watching people play instruments? Is it about people coming together? I don’t know. Getting up on stage and standing above everyone else. I don’t know. I don’t have any idea. It seems, by and large, that it is assumed by some kind of mentality that it is indeed about people playing instruments or something live in front of you and recreating a recording. I certainly hope it’s not about this metaphysical thing of presence, like, They are really there with me. Am I really that much more there with you then as on the recording? I mean, I don’t know about that. So yeah, it’s a big question mark that I don’t have any answers for.”

It takes more than visual gags to build a brand

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:41:00 -0400

When folks share ads like this, they usually preface the images with headlines like “this is what effective advertising looks like” or “what a clever ad!” But while this Colgate floss ad is pretty clever, and while it’s bound to be shared dozens more times than it already has, it doesn’t actually do much for Colgate’s brand. Instead, it’s an example of the sort of ad I want to see less often. Here’s why:

1. It doesn’t actually brand anything. The ad revolves around a visual joke that dramatizes the benefit of flossing. Not flossing with Colgate, specifically. Just flossing. And although “advertising the category” can often work, this ad gives the Colgate brand no other meanings, narratives, or myths that could differentiate Colgate from any of its competitors.

After the two seconds it takes to figure out the fruit sans seeds is a metaphor for flossing, you’re left with an ad that says nothing about Colgate except the fact that it functions exactly how floss should. You could substitute the little product picture on the bottom right for any other brand of floss and the ad would make the same amount of sense.

On the other hand, try inserting Axe deodorant into an Old Spice ad or the other way around. See what I mean? Building a brand requires far more than merely dramatizing the product’s most basic function.

2. It creates homogeneity. Even with the dearth of elements that would otherwise build meaning for the Colgate brand, you could argue the ad gives plain ol’ floss an idiosyncratic voice. But you would be wrong. I’ve seen dozens of ads for disparate products use this exact “brand voice,” in which they draw upon visual gags to dramatize their most basic benefits. By advertising itself in this way, Colgate starts to resemble every other product that used this voice in the past. It’s an exercise in homogeneity. It accomplishes the exact opposite of what branding should do.

3. It showcases the agency rather than the brand. Because this sort of ad is devoid of brand meanings that the product can call its own, and because it slathers the product in a voice identical to ads featuring entirely different brands, it ends up showcasing the voice of the agency or the copywriter more than it conveys the nature of the brand it’s supposed to advertise. The product itself takes a back seat to the advertiser. Which, once again, is totally backwards.

I was once told that, when advertising is at its best, it seems not to come from an agency at all, but from the heart of the brand. Something that cannot be said of the ad above.

4. It lacks legs for future work. While this ad makes for a clever one-off, the lack of any real brand message, voice, worldview, mythology, etc leaves us nothing to extend to other platforms or even to future campaigns. Like, we’ll keep finding clever ways to tell our audience “floss cleans your teeth?” It’s weak.

Ultimately, when we’re standing in the dusty corner of the supermarket where all the floss lines the walls, and we’re trying to choose between rows of identical brands, will Colgate stand out because at one time it was featured in an ad that made a clever visual joke about flossing? We might remember the gag, but it’s safe to say we’ll forget why it existed at all.

Breaking the ice in silence: mobile gaming and public life

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 21:20:00 -0400

As Zynga continues to hemorrhage employees and stock value, casual gaming seems to have found plenty of promise on mobile devices. And although developers face challenges building an audience without the techniques that worked so well on the computer screen, mobile game development is on the rise.

But here’s the interesting part—unlike laptops and desktops, the mobile phone has for over a decade been our panacea for alleviating the tension that comes from dragging our private selves into public space. During those moments we’re surrounded by strangers (or even friends!), the phone gives us a bubble of our own into which we can duck away. And the rise of smartphones, accompanied by the increasing popularity of mobile games, seems poised to change the nature of both our private bubbles and the public life that surrounds them.

Now, as you probably know, the cell phone gave us many ways to cope with the inherent insecurity of public life even before text messaging. Jonathan Franzen describes really nicely the role that mobile phones play in this spacial negotiation. It’s a really long blurb, but well worth reading:

Just 10 years ago, New York City (where I live) still abounded with collectively maintained public spaces in which citizens demonstrated respect for their community by not inflicting their banal bedroom lives on it. The world 10 years ago was not yet fully conquered by yak. It was still possible to see the use of Nokias as an ostentation or an affectation of the affluent. Or, more generously, as an affliction or a disability or a crutch. There was unfolding, after all, in New York in the late 1990s, a seamless citywide transition from nicotine culture to cellular culture. One day the lump in the shirt pocket was Marlboros, the next day it was Motorola. One day the vulnerably unaccompanied pretty girl was occupying her hands and mouth and attention with a cigarette, the next day she was occupying them with a very important conversation with a person who wasn’t you. One day a crowd gathered around the first kid on the playground with a pack of Kools, the next day around the first kid with a color screen. One day travelers were clicking lighters the second they were off an airplane, the next day they were speed-dialing. Pack-a-day habits became hundred-dollar monthly Verizon bills. Smoke pollution became sonic pollution. Although the irritant changed overnight, the suffering of a self-restrained majority at the hands of a compulsive minority, in restaurants and airports and other public spaces, remained eerily constant. Back in 1998, not long after I’d quit cigarettes, I would sit on the subway and watch other riders nervously folding and unfolding phones, or nibbling on the teatlike antennae that all the phones then had, or just quietly clutching their devices like a mother’s hand, and I would feel something close to sorry for them. It still seemed to me an open question how far the trend would go: whether New York truly wanted to become a city of phone addicts sleepwalking down the sidewalks in icky little clouds of private life, or whether the notion of a more restrained public self might somehow prevail.

Franzen’s cigarette metaphor is apt, but with old fashioned cell phones being replaced by their “smart” cousins, it also seems oddly dated.

The phone user of the late nineties and early aughts sought refuge from public space by striking up highly audible conversations. Like second hand smoke, whiffs of random peoples’ private lives would waft in your direction whether you liked it or not. And to make matters worse, cell phone conversations are often amplified, exaggerated. A way to cope with public personhood by overstating the private.

Smartphones, on the other hand, let us seek the same refuge in a much more silent way.

Climb aboard DC’s metro any time there’s more than, say, five others riding, and you’re bound to see someone whip out their smartphone and whisk themselves away to the world of a casual game. But it’s a quiet, lonesome escape. Other passengers aren’t yanked into the private worlds of over-the-phone interlocutors who speak with just a little too much fervor. Instead, it’s a train full of private bubbles that don’t intersect.

But casual games can’t replace the comforting power of calling a close friend. Interacting with a computer-generated chess opponent or with rows and rows of unvanquished Tetris blocks won’t assure you that, out there in the trenches of public life, everything will be OK. That’s why it’s a little baffling that, according to the MIT Technology Review article I linked above, mobile developers are having such difficulty filling their games with the same sort of social elements that made games like Farmville such a hit.

My suggestion? The team putting together tomorrow’s hit mobile game should hang out at a bus stop. A doctors’ office. The DMV. Any place where there’s bound to be icy tension between the self and everyone else. And when they find themselves reaching for their phones, they should ask, “how can my game alleviate this tension I’m feeling right now?” Because when someone actually downloads and plays their game, it will likely be to do just that.

DMV pic by Omar Omar

I love this. It’s almost a commentary on (or even a parody...

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 23:29:00 -0400

I love this. It’s almost a commentary on (or even a parody of) the whole concept of branding. Something as simple as ice cream can totally transform when accompanied by visual cues laden with cultural meaning.

With online communities, the real fun comes when the conflict starts

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:08:00 -0400

Online communities have been a thing since the internet was just a little baby internet, and it’s safe to say most folks who claim to be “digital natives” are also “online forum natives” in some form or another. But now that brands are discovering more ways to connect with audiences online, there has been growing interest in building new communities from the ground up.

It makes sense, then, that folks would try to figure out how today’s thriving communities reached the heights they did. In the past few months, Fast Company covered the rise of Pinterest, as well as DavisWiki, the local wiki page for the town surrounding UC Davis. What both communities have in common, aside from being incredibly vibrant, is a set of founding members who, from the looks of things, poured into the community every ounce of passion they had.

For DavisWiki, FastCompany writes:

Neustrom and Mike Ivanov launched the first site (not that they knew many more would be coming) simply to capture the weird stuff they were learning about Davis as students there. They were discovering underground tunnels and campus chickens and strange building history.

…

And then the whole concept took off, with Davis residents relishing the opportunity to contribute what they knew. “People think it’s like Patch.com, that we pay people to do this,” Neustrom says. “No, we don’t pay people anything! People are just into it. They just love the idea of having this project. And that’s what we want: all of these autonomous, cool communities.”

And for Pinterest:

In Pinterest’s early days, Silbermann gave out his cell-phone number, attended blogger meet-ups, and personally composed weekly emails that were sent out to Pinterest’s tiny, but growing, community. “It’s like you’ve built this little city with nobody inside of it yet,” he says. “And you want to fill it up with the right kinds of people who are going to teach future people what they should be doing when they move in.” Most Silicon Valley types look at early users as viral marketers; Silbermann saw them as role models. (Until recently, Pinterest’s welcome email advised users to “pin carefully” because “your pins set the tone for the community.”

But while these origin stories are pretty fascinating, it’s not exactly news that a community would begin with passionate founders. What’s really interesting— and largely missing from the Fast Company articles— are the levels of control each community had to exert to make sure the right forms of passion were channeled in the right ways.

For most communities, maybe a year or two down the road, the original founders’ vision will meet challenges. They will confront new members who are just as passionate as they are but either express that passion in different ways or prefer different forms of content. And the founders will have to determine to what extent they mold their original vision to meet those new realities. To name an extreme example, how would you react if your community developed a vibrant subgroup who liked to exchange nude pictures of underage girls?

Last year, Farhad Manjoo poked fun at Pinterest for its emphasis on literal-minded earnestness rather than the sort of tongue-in-cheek humor that seemed to fill the rest of the internet, proving the community really had developed a salient tone. You were more likely to see folks post pictures of bedspreads because they genuinely liked the bedspreads than you were to see proclamations that nothing really mattress.

How naturally did this tone emerge? How much moderation was needed to maintain it? Did an internal culture form over time in which the members policed themselves? Or was it all top-down?

Meanwhile, the wiki nature of DavisWiki means self-policing is both inevitable and encouraged. There’s no need for a benevolent dictator to steer the content, because the platform lets members moderate themselves. But it’s worth exploring how the resulting group dynamics developed over time. How many competing interests inhabit DavisWiki? How many “edit wars” do we see, and what form do they take?

If brands want to sculpt communities from the ground up, finding passionate founding members will only be the first step. The truly interesting part happens once the place blows up and outsiders come spilling in. Then we can see how the founding members react, and it’s like watching the most entertaining fish tank ever.

Fish pic taken from !ºrobodot

On ideologies, advertising, and pants

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 09:33:00 -0400

Often you’ll hear people say advertising exists primarily to sell products. And while this is true, it leads many folks to believe every ad needs an explicit call to action and a straight-faced reading of product benefits, both of which create really dull (and really ineffective) work. And, as you’ve probably seen, the hard-sell is a sure ticket to the kinds of annoying interruptions we all try to avoid.

Instead, the best ads present a lens for viewing the world. They offer an ideological framework that makes the purchase of their product desirable.

This morning I saw a great example of this framework-making function not in an ad but in a Slate article, which asks its readers to stop ironing their clothes. Here’s a quote:

Wrinkled clothes represent fabric as it is, not as we wish it to be. Cotton, for instance, is meant to luxuriate in those criss-crossing gulches, those puffs of pockmarks. It is born in the fields, born from the ground! Why can we not find it in our hearts to accept its inherent wildness? Why must we labor to tame it, for centuries on end, in an endless stalemate of human versus wrinkle? We will never win. Wisdom dictates: Just give in. Free your fabric and your mind will follow.

You could easily imagine this copy as a voiceover for a television spot, no? It’s really interesting copy. It ties the wrinkling of cotton to a narrative of authenticity, where only through leaving cotton wrinkled can we experience the true nature of the fabric. There are references to “the fields” and the “ground,” to taming “inherent wildness.” It’s rife with little signifiers that usher forth a sort of back-to-our-roots ideology.

And it’s meaning-laden copy like this that has the potential to disrupt categories. Imagine if Dockers witnessed all its competitors adopt its signature anti-wrinkle fabric (my guess is they already have). Struggling for market share, Dockers could differentiate itself by taking a Pro Wrinkle stance. Tap into those narratives of authenticity, talk about how men’s clothing has distanced itself from our “natural roots” and needs an overhaul.

It could then discontinue those non-iron pants and, with the wrinkle-prone chinos that remain, ruffle them up before hanging them on in-store displays.

A Facebook campaign would ask fans to submit pics of their most wrinkled, messy outfits, the best of which would be displayed on Dockers’ homepage. These are the people who embrace cotton’s inherent wildness, the page might say.

And once that’s over, there are plenty of other content-marketing possibilities. Send Dockers Agents across America to find the most sterile office in the country. Then give that office a makeover to “untame it.”

See? Once you couple the brand with a lens or framework, the executions and the nitty-gritty start to present themselves naturally.

Ultimately, mass media have an amazing ability to mess with our worldviews. To justify beliefs we already have or to make us feel uneasy when our beliefs clash with someone else’s. That’s why, when brands tap into this ability of the media to create and challenge social meanings, you see the sort of work that prompts discussions and disrupts categories. The stuff that makes us feel differently about a product or even the world in general.

And because these narratives can constantly be flipped, challenged, reshaped, there’s always potential for brands to unleash this kind of work in the future. Even if the product in question is a pair of pants.

Picture of wrinkled clothing taken from http://thewelldressedman.net

Microsoft just invented a ritual for the Surface. Hmm.

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 07:48:00 -0400

As I’ve discussed in an earlier post, I’m always fascinated when companies use visual media to associate their products with rituals, whether or not people practice those rituals in real life.

I’m also fascinated when brands depict on-screen “communities” in their ads, hoping we’ll imagine the brand as part of that community and consequently ourselves as members when we buy the product.

Microsoft’s new spot for its Surface tablet, which I’ve posted above, does both. It presents a fictional community participating in a ritual. And of course that means I can’t help but post it on my blog.

This tactic of bringing lots of folks together in front of a camera and presenting them as a community, a tactic you’ll see often in the branding efforts of Coke and Pepsi, is interesting because it seems tailored specifically to reach as wide an audience as possible. The whole world is gathering around this one brand, and you get to be a part of a global movement!

But what’s peculiar about the movement that Microsoft has put together is that it’s unified around a single behavior—clicking together a keyboard and a tablet. It’s as if the strategy team expected their audience to reject this clicking action, so they decided the spot should make the behavior seem totally normal by presenting throngs of average folks doing it together.

Not that connecting two pieces of computer equipment is all that weird, but it strikes me as strange that Microsoft would have to overstate so dramatically that “This is Something Normal People Do.” Oh, and it reminds me of this Brazilian ad, which also presents a visual community in order to frame a potentially taboo behavior as normal.

According to Jeremy Holden, one of the emotional elements that hold together social movements is the set of visual symbols that “represent an encapsulating beacon” for the movement’s members, symbols that can come to signify the movement so thoroughly that their removal effectively strips away the emotional support the movement once had. The Roman Legion had its eagle. Microsoft has a clicking keyboard.

Content strategy, tuna style

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 12:19:00 -0400

I love reading about the ways branding tactics that seem “of the moment” are just repackaged versions of practices that date back a century or longer.

According to a Slate article published last month, tuna companies used a form of content strategy to woo shoppers before anyone even dreamed of social media:

Mainstream Americans considered the fish too gamey, until a cannery in San Pedro Bay, Calif., figured out that the steamed white meat of albacore tuna has very little flavor if you drain the fish’s own oil and can the meat with olive or cottonseed oil instead. The company began marketing the product as a chicken alternative in 1907. It distributed thousands of free recipe booklets, which contained mostly classic chicken or canned salmon recipes with tuna as a substitute. Americans found that tuna’s flavor was hardly noticeable in the right sauce, and sales began to rise.

Through disseminating free booklets, the tuna cannery gave its product a new set of meanings—tuna was no longer a niche food to be eaten on occasion or to entertain guests. It assumed the airs of an everyday ingredient, one that occupied the same role in the kitchen as chicken and milk.

Here, you can see all the “best practices” in action. The recipe books advanced the brand’s story. They brought real value to potential customers and wove seamlessly into their existing behaviors rather than begging them to adopt new ones. Pretty much all the characteristics of a successful content strategy except without the news feed.

And when we see these analog versions of content strategy done so well, it makes it even more ridiculous when critics dismiss today’s digital equivalent.

Corey Mull argued in AdAge that brands are misguided when they try to form “relationships” with customers through sharing content, first because most folks aren’t interested in relationships with brands and second because sharing content only leads to cognitive overload.

All valid points, except he assumes content strategy exists only to form these sorts of “relationships.” He overlooks the far more powerful form of content strategy that helped tuna achieve its current place in American kitchens. The sort of content that wraps brands in cultural meaning the same way print and television advertisements have done for decades.

Take a look at Gap’s relatively recent collaboration with fashion bloggers, such as this tie-in with Hypebeast and the Street Etiquette fixture Joshua Kissi.

Yes, asking viewers to “like” the image is pretty lame, but there’s something more interesting afoot— Gap, a company that has struggled with relevance in the past few years, associates itself visually with two fashion communities that are relevant. And it does so in a way that looks sort of convincing. The model, a fashion blogger who has built a formidible fan base of his own, doesn’t abandon his style to “sell out to the megabrand” but instead incorporates Gap seamlessly into his existing look. It’s difficult to tell what sort of relationship this content forms with anyone, but it does generate a fresh set of cultural meanings for the brand.

Using content strategy to give brands cultural meaning also prevents the sort of cognitive overload Corey mentions in his article. While everyone might be sharing content nowadays, the brands that pierce through the noise are the ones whose content resonates with the values and desires of particular audiences. Which makes it even more crucial that brands make as clear as possible what communities, ideologies, and milieus they associate with and then design their content to entrench those associations in a deeper way.

And for a great example of content strategy that achieves this sort of resonance, we need only turn to the recipe booklets that taught households in 1907 how to cook tuna.

Top photo by difractado

When you own the car and you drive the car, even your decisions about, “are you going to put...

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 23:44:00 -0400

When you own the car and you drive the car, even your decisions about, “are you going to put a bumper sticker on it?” There’s an idea of an audience.

I feel pretty strongly that this is true, not just for cars, but for almost everything you buy, that our real “audience” is really ourselves. And the person that you’re really speaking to when you’re speaking about, “why me in this car? Why is this the right car for me?”… You’re making a statement to yourself about yourself.

In sort of an abstract way, you’re sort of, you’re thinking about what they might be thinking of you and, like, whether or not they like your Obama sticker or your “save the whales” or, you know, your Christian fish or whatever it might be.

But the crucial thing is the self, is your own audience, your own story of, like, “I’m not that guy, I am that guy” or that woman.

Because the truth is, no one cares, on the highway.

Rob Walker from the documentary Objectified

In the land of "dark social," cultural relevance matters

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 15:19:00 -0400

Public communications platforms like Twitter and Facebook have given such a high degree of visibility to specific ways of talking about brands that, whenever a new study comes along and reveals the ways brands are not being discussed in public, it becomes Big News.

An Atlantic article last week discussed the shadowy place where referrer traffic is untraceable, because the traffic comes from links passed around in private rather than from other websites. Since so many different exchanges (emails, Gchats, Skype conversations, mysterious diaries found in parking lots) can generate this sort of “direct” traffic, it’s incredibly difficult to measure.

The article even states that, across a broad aggregate of online magazines and other media sites, almost 69% of the social referrals came from these untraceable sources.

And while it’s important to highlight the forms of online communication that take place outside the public eye, this new piece of data mostly reiterates a truth many marketers have already heard but which nonetheless gets muffled amid all the talk of social media engagement.

Napkin Labs recently found that only 6% of fans engage with a brand’s Facebook page via likes, comments, polls and other means, while a study conducted a year beforehand found something similar:

Being a fan, for the most part, is a rather passive activity. A whopping 77% of consumers said they interact with brands on Facebook primarily through reading posts and updates from the brands.

A measly 17% of respondents said they interact with brands by sharing experiences and news stories with others about the brand, and only 13% of respondents said they post updates about brands that they Like.

In fact, giving disproportionate attention to a form of engagement only a minority of folks practice is quite a common theme. Martin Weigel summarizes the issue in an excellent blog post, in which he writes:

The visible consumer is easy to find. Visible and vocal, they are the people lining up waiting for the new Apple Store to open. Waiting overnight to be the first to buy the latest iteration of Call of Duty. Or Harry Potter. Sporting Harley Davidson tattoos, and signing up as fans on Facebook. The visible consumer is well, visible. They don’t require that much effort to find and spot.

…

But uncritically extrapolating from the visible consumer or placing a disproportionate emphasis on the visible consumer warps our understanding. And blinds us from seeing and understanding the consumers who really matter.

It’s easy to direct most of our focus to the discussions taking place on public platforms, where a brand’s most devout enthusiasts lay out their opinions and attitudes for all to see. But this obscures the vast number of conversations happening in private, conversations in which folks attach a whole range of meanings to the brands they discuss without any of it wafting toward marketers’ ears.

But the fact that we lack direct access to these interactions needn’t discourage us. Instead, it’s a call to make brands culturally relevant, to hone our communication strategies so they resonate with the large swathes of people whose thoughts and behaviors we can’t monitor in real time. Here are a few ways to do this:

First, make it easy to figure out where the brand fits culturally, so it’s just as easy for me to talk about that brand with my friends.

When I say “fits culturally,” I mean the brand should make clear what causes they support and what values, milieus, and communities, they associate with.

J Crew, for example, has embedded itself so thoroughly in the heritage Americana aesthetic that the company comes to mind every time someone dares to say the phrase “timeless and classic.”

Brands like Stonyfield, Chipotle, and Patagonia use owned and paid media to advocate for real environmental change.

And Whole Foods taps into the foodie values of the upper middle class to establish itself as the official grocer of the American yuppie.

Associating the brand with a clear cultural milieu is important because, while I know very few people who will repeat to their friends a brand’s tag line or key soundbites, plenty of folks who will mention a brand if it solidifies their own connection to a particular identity or cultural space.

In other words, because these brands’ cultural associations are so pronounced, I know exactly how I’m positioning myself when I talk about them with my friends. And if drawing attention to a particular brand associates me with a desirable identity or community, I’m much more likely to mention that brand in conversation (or walk around carrying Whole Foods bags like the man above).

I hear way too many folks, whether in interviews or trade publications, draw a line between “lifestyle brands” and “functional brands,” where a toiletries company shouldn’t try to embed itself in a cultural space because, well, it makes toiletries. But if you really want people to discuss your deodorant, tying that product to a desirable identity (look at Old Spice or even Axe!) is a good way to start.

Second, find a point of view that taps into the desires of large swathes of people.

In the blog post from Martin Weigel I mentioned above, two of the brands he cites for their zealous niche audiences are Apple and Harley. And yet both brands reached the heights they did because their messaging grasped the ideological core of broad cultural movements, touching upon concerns that lots of people shared.

Apple best summarized its ideological connections in its 1998 “Think Different” campaign, but since then the majority of its communications have championed the same themes of nonconformity and creativity, along with the idea of using these traits to make life simpler and more fulfilling. Arguably, Apple’s embededness in such a consistent set of values accounts for the uproar that ignited when the company released its “Genius” ads last July, where the cultural cues of past campaigns had been replaced by something far more banal.

Harley Davidson, as its 2011 “Cages” spot makes clear, taps into the theme of escape from hum drum mediocrity. The image of the tough-guy rider doesn’t just deepen the brand’s appeal among a niche audience. It becomes a symbol for a much more widely-held set of desires.

Lastly, make sure your communications strategy actually aligns with your business practices and internal culture.

Many brands have a campaign or two where they embed themselves in a cultural space, and that’s about it. Visit their website, and they become another dull brand drawing attention to the same dull set of rational benefits as all their competitors.

On the other hand, brands that do have a cohesive communications strategy fall apart when their business practices diverge wildly from the ways they present themselves. No example is clearer than BP, which carried all the visual symbols of a ‘green company,’ and yet, well, you know the rest.

Ideally, the brand’s external presence should spring from values and practices within the company. That way, even with employees using social media to broadcast their own thoughts, and even with customers interacting with the brand offline in ways social media managers will never hear about, there is far less a chance of image clashing with reality.

In the end, the fact that only a fraction of conversations about brands reach the ears of marketers shouldn’t be a cause for alarm. Instead, it’s a reason to take a deeper look at how brands resonate with the values of audiences from many different communities. How (or even whether) they incorporate that brand into their identities. And how we can use that information to adjust our communications strategy to motivate the broadest number of people even if they fall outside the reach of our social media presence.

Say hello to the single entree retailers

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 18:02:00 -0400

Now that the web has erased much of the overhead from running a retail store, we’re seeing companies pop up online with small ranges of products backed by compelling brand narratives. It’s like single-entree restaurants, but digital.

Everlane (as I said, I will never get tired of mentioning these guys) is a great example. They stock a small collection of tops and a few accessories, but these goods are made so well and marketed with such a solid communications strategy that the lack of variety is usually the last thing people talk about.

But just recently, I discovered another tiny clothing company with its own signature line of goods and a neat story underneath it all. Lunch + Dinner, a company based in LA, offers exactly one product. It’s a bundle of three t-shirts: a black one, a white one, and a grey one. And no, you can’t mix and match. Your only choice in the matter is the size of shirt you buy.

This lack of choice, however, is where the genius of the product lies. Lunch + Dinner has wrapped itself in a brand narrative that champions simplicity and reasonability. The site proclaims its bundle of tees are the “only tees you need.” Why have to choose from rows and rows of options when you could stick with three basic shades and move on with your life? Near the bottom of the front page is a manifesto (seriously, when is there not a manifesto?):

To own a t-shirt you can feel presentable in, anytime and anywhere.

To not advertise with your clothing.

To support the first edition of a new label so there can be a second.

To wear things that are unique.

…but also stick to the basics.

To pay a reasonable price.

To buy things made in the United States.

To do the design, take the photos, build the website, pack the shipping tubes, and talk to customers all by myself.

…without the inefficiencies of a big company — products by real people.

To collaborate with my best friend since 3rd grade to make the shirts.

To try something new.

Thanks for your help,

x Jacob

Lunch + Dinner

Ultimately, Lunch + Dinner arrives with a view of the world that’s clearly defined and a product that represents that worldview every step of the way. It’s not difficult to see the link between pressing “buy” and partaking in the brand narrative.

And as brick and mortar stores devise new ways to compete with online counterparts and reduce the ill effects of showrooming, it seems this small-but-focused retail model will gain significant traction, if not become the leading model for future retailers. Best Buy, for one, is experimenting with more compact stores that focus on mobile technology, complete with a help desk that mirrors the Apple Genius Bar.

Shacking up in a smaller space, however, won’t be enough to turn Best Buy around unless the company also comes up with a brand message that goes beyond “we sell electronic stuff for cheap!” Since there is always a cheaper product hiding somewhere in the corners of the internet, it’s critical that Best Buy make its brand and in-store experience compelling enough to amass a fan base that stays put. So don’t be surprised if you see formerly huge companies looking at upstarts like Everlane and Lunch + Dinner for inspiration.

"Ghetto testing": the antidote for reluctant brands

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 14:38:00 -0400

Allstate recently told a bunch of people about how their ad campaign featuring the “Mayhem” character went directly on air without the usual bouts of focus group testing.

This announcement, however, does less to show Allstate’s bravado than it does to highlight the cloud of caution everyone else lives in.

And what makes this caution particularly frustrating is that the digital space has given marketers plenty of ways to launch messaging tactics without pushing them through exhaustive market research. Yet I still see brands balk at trying new and interesting ideas.

Zynga is a perfect example of how digital offers the scaffolding for a bit of tasteful recklessness. As you might have read, the casual gaming company is a big fan of “ghetto testing.” It tweaks its games in ways only a fraction of its userbase can access and then measures their response. If the test group reacts well, that change is adopted across the entire userbase. Features are always being tested, and Zynga is always listening.

E-tailers are also fans of ghetto testing. Everlane, a brand I will never tire of mentioning, shows customers different reward programs and compares the effects of those programs on buying decisions. And, as with Zynga, all this testing happens far outside the focus group to customers whose decisions carry real effects for the company.

The process of experimenting isn’t just a practice. It’s a mindset. It’s an embrace of doing a bunch of small things (but doing them!) rather than sitting in a room pondering the next big move. And, as long as publishing content and collecting data continues to be relatively cheap, it’s a mindset that’s both practical and maybe even necessary to adopt.

And yet, when it comes to communications strategies, way too many folks approach their brands while walking on their tip toes.

Discover’s “Peggy” campaign, though it eventually gained popularity both as a traditional TV campaign and as a social media presence, endured hefty amounts of reluctance from the company higher-ups and didn’t get the OK until after it emerged from the market research treatment relatively unharmed.

While they were waiting for results to come in, Discover’s marketers could have ghetto tested Peggy by mirroring some of the tactics Grant McCracken suggested for “Sophie,” a character he created to help a large brand reach a teenage audience. He gave Sophie a rich back story, one compelling enough that folks would actually want to explore the character’s mythology and even contribute “fan fiction” themselves.

More importantly, he intended to tell the story not through traditional media but through lots of small, almost guerrilla-like tactics (one example: setting up spectacles in key urban locations). Multitudes of small audiences reached at different times rather than one audience reached at once.

And although the Sophie campaign never materialized, it carries the same advantage Zynga and Everlane reaped from their ghetto-testing—the ability to tweak the campaign as it progressed, to see in real time with real customers what works and what doesn’t.

It’s understandable why brands would hesitate to jump into this sort of experimentation, as the specters of Waitrose, Belvedere, and McDonalds hover in the distance.

But while the missteps of those brands made them the subject of mockery at the hands of a merciless internet, the digital space offers a bright side—the ability to bounce back.

Look at Dominos, who launched a campaign in which they acknowledged their own shortcomings, even going as far ripping negative reviews from Twitter and publishing them for everyone to see. The campaign warmed the public perception of a brand that for a while drew mostly frustration.

Just imagine—while folks are rushing to their platform of choice to make fun of one digital execution, your brand could be hard at work on the next one, ready to blow people’s minds.

Confronting the busy trap

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 18:16:00 -0400

@judyabel just posted some interesting commentary on the “busy-ness” trend, where folks tie their identities to their jam-packed schedules. You can check it out here

Now, toward the end, she discusses the damaging effects that a work-drenched lifestyle has on productivity, innovation, and mental health. I’ve quoted it below:

judyabel:

Either, there needs to time to relax, recharge and rebalance. Without that necessary “down time,” our ability to innovate lessens. Playing as well as working is necessary. Through playing, we discover new ideas. Through resting, we take the time needed to approach problems from new angles. The key to longer term success and ultimately, being content, appear to be finding the balance for yourself between being busy and taking the time to rejuvenate.

As noted in my earlier article, The Rise of Digital Detox, the constant flood of information can become overwhelming. So much so, that unplugged vacation packages are surging in popularity and free apps are on the rise that actually block us from working

What’s most interesting about the discussion over our modern work culture is how widespread it is. I’ve seen articles in publications like the WSJ, Fast Company, etc that all discuss the risks associated with our long hours and our information deluges. And yet, the folks who read these publications are the same folks who have so much personal stake in maintaining busy schedules.

In this way, we see parallels to the conversations happening around smoking, where the risks are firmly established and many smokers want to kick the habit, and yet those same folks keep puffing away.

I wonder, then, with so many people’s identities tied to their busy schedules, how effective it really would be just to inform them of the need to unplug. Much in the same way ads that merely explain the impacts of smoking have largely become redundant.

A brand that wants to counter the “busy-ness” trend will have to face a choice— confront the trend directly or look for other emerging cultural movements that provide an equally seductive identity while promoting a more relaxed lifestyle. Since the direct confrontation approach merely reminds the audience of an internal dialogue they’ve already been waging with themselves, I’ll argue the second option is more effective.

iamjoshuaedmund: finally file sharing makes sense. biological sense. @FastCoDesign covers chirp,...

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:05:00 -0400

iamjoshuaedmund:

finally file sharing makes sense. biological sense.

@FastCoDesign covers chirp, an audio-based file sharing app that has huge scaling potential.

the author raises a valid concern: “QR codes sit in one spot, conveniently, but will people be able to hear a chirp, recognize it and pull out their phones in time to decode it before the tones end? I’m not so sure.” but i think the simplicity of this functional metaphor shows enormous promise.

When QR codes first emerged, they seemed to have so much promise. Brands could slap the codes onto their print ads, their in-store displays, their napkins, their mugs of Guinness, and whisk us away into their own miniature universes. What brands wanted to say about themselves was no longer restricted by the physical dimensions of public space.

As of now, most of us have accepted that the promise of audiences gleefully scanning codes and diving into brands’ extended universes was a good dose of wishful thinking. But with Chirp, we see another interesting way for brands to connect the material world to the virtual one, this time through sound.

The key question is, where QR codes are mostly lonesome figures, with only a few people walking up to pay them a visit and take a quick scan, will Chirp be any different?

Obviously there’s no way to tell. But, as Josh says above, the real power of Chirp lies in the metaphor. The rich mythology it’s already built around itself and how readily it can be incorporated into other narratives.

In its very first moment, the video tells us, “we live in a world of sound. Birds sing to communicate. So why not machines?” Sending URLs through bleeps and bloops suddenly becomes a way to participate in this natural order. To let go of our cold, alien ones and zeros and join the birds in a big pilgrimage back to our roots.

See what I just did? Brands can do that too. Pretty sweet.

A really interesting adventure in package design— using...

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 07:56:00 -0400

A really interesting adventure in package design— using the visual language of liquor to talk about condiments, taking the cultural meanings from one category and bestowing them on another.

paulisakson:

Maple Syrup Slightly Spiked, and Vinegars With a Past - NYTimes.com

Some imitation with your sandwich - the dark side of the Era of Design

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 20:46:00 -0400

Way back in May, Adam Swann declared that we had entered an Era of Design, in a Forbes article that still gets tweeted even a month after its initial publication.

His argument, that folks now crave well designed experiences and the brands that succeed are those that offer them, was refreshing because it signaled an end to what was so long an accepted consequence of Big Business – design decisions birthed from efforts to cut costs rather than enrich lives, with results ranging from bland to outright depressing. The sort of thing documented in all its dystopic glory by folks like James Howard Kunstler and Lewis Baltz.

But while corporation and audience alike are discovering the benefits of embracing design, the movement has a dark side. Many companies, seeing the need to become “design focused” but lacking a thorough understanding of what a design focus actually means, turn to their competitors for inspiration. And create the same bland category conventions the Design Era sought to vanquish in the first place.

To illustrate my point, we needn’t look beyond the “fast casual” category, home to restaurants like Chipotle, Noodles & Company, and Panera.

The majority of fast casual restaurants serve alongside their food a helping of clean modern design. Interiors inviting enough to encourage folks to linger after the coffee has run dry. No more plastic cushioning that says “leave quickly!” A near revolution in the use of public space.

But describing these interiors simply as “clean and modern” doesn’t quite cut it. They’re clean and modern in a very specific way, an aesthetic that echoes in facsimile fashion from one restaurant to the next.

Look at these pics, all interiors from four different fast casual joints, and you’ll see a continuing cast of visual motifs. The open ceiling with exposed innards, the rows of minimalist rectangular tables, the interplay between chrome and wood, the warm color palette. It almost looks like four angles from a single megarestaurant.

Cosi

Merzi

Noodles and Company

Chipotle

With this imitation of visual elements from one restaurant to the next, the aesthetic cues become more than merely “good looking” or “comfortable” or “inviting.” They become a signifier of the legitimacy of the restaurant itself. Like the illustrated barn on organic yogurt to which I referred in my last post, they serve as a visual membership card, a sign to their audience of their worthiness in the category.

Moreover, clinging to that one aesthetic is a convenient way for the restaurants to align themselves with what Richard Florida hailed as the “creative class” and what Douglas Holt calls the “cultural capital cohort.” Ever since Starbucks latched onto the modern/industrial aesthetic back in the 90s, the visual motifs I discussed above have come to signify a sort of creative affluence. Folks who, despite their creature comforts, reject corporate dronehood by seeking out sophisticated cultural expressions. And the use of this aesthetic serves as a way to claim membership to that culture.

Those three elements together—the coziness of the aesthetic itself, the legitimizing effects of following the category conventions, and the desire to appeal to the creative class— make it incredibly tempting for restaurants to adorn themselves with wood and chrome, especially for newcomers who otherwise would face difficulty gathering a following.

Take Merzi, for example, a relatively new fast casual place in DC that focuses on Indian cuisine. In one writeup, founder Qaiser Kazmi describes the potential challenges of acclimating a new audience to his restaurant’s “exotic” offerings. But step inside Merzi, and it will hardly seem exotic at all. The space follows almost exactly the category template, marching in step with Chipotle, Noodles & Company, SweetGreen, etc. It places Merzi immediately inside that milieu, taking something otherwise “foreign” and making it legible.

On face, this legibility is a good thing. It creates a sort of culinary democracy in which different ideas and nationalities share the same social space, united by their love for minimal lines and the copious use of wood.

But on the other hand, the mutual embrace of the exact same aesthetic threatens to muddle the category. If restauranteurs feel that following the category discourse is the only way to appear legitimate and gain a following, there will be no incentive to create new, enriching experiences. The best effects of the Era of Design—using corporate resources to make lives more rewarding—would subside. We’d have a new sort of blandness instead.

So I end with a call for companies to look closely at what they mean when they claim they embrace “good design.” Will they take a hard look at their products, their visual presences, and design them from the ground up? Or will they imitate the aesthetics of their peers in fear of appearing illegitimate? Let’s hope it’s the former.

Two days ago Oliver Reichenstein posted an essay on why “social buttons” were not just...

Thu, 31 May 2012 09:32:00 -0400

Two days ago Oliver Reichenstein posted an essay on why “social buttons” were not just unnecessary but outright harmful both for producers and devourers of content.

Aurora had some interesting points in response, quoted below

aurora:

Some interesting thoughts (to be completely honest it was a bit TL:DR) but if I’m on a site on my mobile phone -which I think we can safely say people are doing more often these days-if there isn’t a twitter share button I just won’t share it. It just takes too much effort to cut and paste the URL and retype a headline if im on my phone. Sure I get a good portion of my news based on my news feed, but I absolutely visit many sites on a daily basis to supplement my daily information intake. This post feels a bit myopic.

In spending so much time discussing the role of social buttons in the “classic” browsing experience, Oliver indeed skipped over the potential usefulness the buttons might have for a mobile context.

But to be fair to Oliver, whereas social buttons might be pure utility in the cramped environs of the smartphone, on larger screens they tend to take on a different meaning entirely, one that’s less utilitarian than cultural. And not necessarily in a good way.

Letting the logos of Facebook, Twitter, etc take residence on your blog post is like sticking a barn illustration on your natural yogurt— a way to reap legitimacy by promising readers your blog is just as worthy as the rest.

And it is from this interpretation of the buttons that Oliver’s points make more sense. It’s a sort of cloying social gesture that distracts from the content itself.

I somewhat agree, but there is something to be said about reading an article and knowing from the sharing statistics that you’re reading something big. That you’re taking part in a global conversation. So ultimately it’s a balance between giving “important” articles a sense of immediacy and prodding readers with needless and annoying gestures. After all, there are tons of ways to show people your yogurt is wholesome without that stupid illustrated barn.

This Tuesday on Pay-Per-View: Colas jostle for the exact same positioning

Wed, 30 May 2012 18:59:00 -0400

Here’s an excerpt from an AdAge article from earlier this month on Pepsi’s rebranding

“Brands that are timeless want to have museums,” Mr. Jakeman said, referring to the World of Coca-Cola attraction. “Pepsi is not a brand that belongs in a museum.”

Coke, Mr. Jakeman said, represents happiness and moments of joy, while it protects culture and maintains the status quo. Pepsi, on the other hand, creates culture and embraces individuality. For Pepsi loyalists, leading an exciting life is much more important than leading a happy one, Mr. Jakeman said.

Those insights led Pepsi to embrace a brand positioning to “capture the excitement of now,” and the campaign that has been developed carries the tagline, “Live for Now.” It’s already proved a potent rallying cry.

The current state of the cola wars is fascinating for a bunch of reasons. Let me touch on them:

1. Being present while a brand soul-searches and constructs new narratives for itself is like witnessing the birth of a rhinoceros. Magical

2. As I’ve discussed earlier, Coke has for a really long time positioned itself as inextricable from the public sphere. And, from Pepsi’s latest “Live for Now” campaign, it seems Pepsi also wants a piece of that public sphere pie. Granted, Pepsi has attempted this positioning for a while as well, with its ye-old “Pepsi Generation” campaign and the more recent Refresh Project, but it’s interesting to see two warring behemoths use such a similar set of symbols/stories.

More specifically, both brands try to connect the imaginations of their audiences to a massive social movement of the we-are-the-world variety.

Pepsi, as you can see in the excerpt above, argues that its emphasis on spontaneity is enough to differentiate the brand sufficiently from its arch rival. Unlike Coke, Pepsi is all about living in the present, maaan. Cherishing the moment, rushing past security to share the stage with Nicki Minaj (but only for a moment!). But, in order to tell these tales of spontaneity, Pepsi uses a visual lexicon that’s really similar to what Coke uses— images of strangers gleefully sharing public space.

Now, Alan Snitow has a convincing argument for why it’s strategically sound for competitors to attempt the same positioning. But the two brands’ war for the same set of narratives is weird to me for reasons I’ll explain in my final point…

3. …Which is that the image war is strangely disconnected from the ways people actually feel about Coke and Pepsi. The story you’ll often hear is of the family who sits down at a restaurant and, when the time comes to order drinks, asks the most crucial question of the night— “do you guys have Coke or Pepsi?” When the answer is wrong, what follows is some combination of eye-rolling and grumbling, a reluctant acceptance that for an hour they’ll have to play for the opposite team.

In other words, lots of people are very passionate about which side of the cola fence they stand on, and it’s strange to me that Pepsi wouldn’t tap into or be inspired by those passions, choosing instead an approach that is almost the advertising equivalent of one-size-fits-all.

Perhaps Pepsi is even spending too much time scrutinizing its one and only major competitor, to the point where even if they see their own strategy as divergent and fresh, it still apes a large chunk of the opponent’s visual language. In which case Pepsi could learn a few lessons from Derice Bannock and the Swiss team.

Field Notes: another example of why FMCG brands don't have to suck

Tue, 29 May 2012 09:41:00 -0400

Like every other brand shunned to commodity status, miniature notebooks could easily have been marketed on features alone. After all, notebooks are just a bunch of paper bound together in a package small enough to stick in your pocket. They say nothing to passersby about your personal identity, because they’re hidden in your pantaloons. And like most other commodities, they are depleted and replaced.

But mini notebooks are not commodities. Notebook companies have found ways to connect their products to rich narratives and mythologies, transforming them from bundles of utilitarian features to important signifiers of personal identity. The classic example is Moleskine, which over the course of its history became a signifier of the liberal intelligentsia and all things thoughtful and sensitive.

Field Notes, a relative newcomer, has avoided commodity-dom in a different way by latching onto a cultural milieu that rests outside books and paper entirely. It’s useful to take a look at Field Notes’ approach for a second, since it has a range of consequences for FMCG branding in general.

As I somewhat discussed in another post, the fashion and design world has given men an easily digestible masculine image rooted in a sort of nostalgic Americana. For a whole host of reasons no one’s agreed on (the all-to-easy explanation is the economy), a sizable chunk of men are pining for products that ooze with authenticity, with weather-worn perseverance, products that have been made more or less the same way for decades and can last about as long. Or, at the very least, products that give off the feeling that, at some point in the production process, they were touched by calloused dirty hands. Even if, you know, they were factory made like everything else.

If you’re confused, spend two minutes with the J Crew catalog and you’ll understand.

Field Notes makes the brilliant move of latching onto that milieu, appointing itself the official notebook of the “classic Americana” set. One way it does this is by using the same semiotic cues that sprinkle the types of goods you’ll see in J Crew: You get the roughshod cardboard exterior, the bold but tasteful typography, the “made in USA” sign written clearly on the front.

But even more interesting (and arguably more important) are the unorthodox choices the brand makes for the stores that carry it. Look at the retail locations page on Field Notes’ website, and instead of seeing the usual roster of big box stores, you’ll see a smattering of menswear boutiques. The kind that sell nostalgic, masculine, 100% American wares.

Lastly, the brand’s connection to that milieu is so seamless because, in a way, miniature notebooks are already a part of the cultural narrative. The Everyday Carry blog, where men submit piles of the gear they carry around with them on their daily adventures, regularly features notebooks tossed in with the knives and pocket-watches (Though, disappointingly, the notebooks aren’t always Field Notes). It’s a site connected pretty closely to the menswear scene, featured in influential clothing blogs like A Continuous Lean. In this way, the digital menswear community has already anointed notebooks as carriers of the classic/rugged/American narrative. Field Notes just calls very explicit attention to that connection.

Are there any downsides to this approach? Perhaps, such as limiting audiences, reaching only the highly visible segments while ignoring the rest.

But because the themes and narratives with which Field Notes surrounds itself are quite universal, they have the potential to radiate outward and affect audiences regardless of their level of zealousness. All while differentiating the brand quite powerfully and creating lots of entry-points for folks to start identifying with it.

To close, here are the lessons every FMCG brand can learn from Field Notes:

· Just because a product looks like a disposable commodity doesn’t mean it has to act like one

· To avoid the pit of commodity-dom, find a narrative, cultural context, or community with which to associate.

· Find lots of ways to tell your story. Field notes uses packaging semiotics, store placement, as well as stuff like videos of the co-founder showing off his vintage notebook collection. Cultural associations can’t be superficial or cynical. They have to be all pervasive.

Before anyone says Field Notes is some sort of unique case, there are tons of examples of other brands that do this. Method embeds itself in the world of folks who crave good design just as much as clean counters. Stonyfield brings yogurt eaters together in a big virtual activist movement. And what those brands have in common is passion and imagination. Two things most FMCG brands ought to try.

Burger King: the complexities of branding rituals

Wed, 02 May 2012 17:34:00 -0400

A few hours after I posted my super long entry on branding rituals, this popped up on Reddit.

And it makes me wonder— what happens when the rituals that brands envision don’t quite match reality? Not a rare occurrence, since I think it’s safe to say dramatized “moments of consumption” are almost always a step or two removed from the ways that consumption actually takes place.

But while that boy in the green shirt— the eating one, not the comatose one— shoves those fries into his mouth, it’s fascinating to wonder what he’s thinking. Have Burger King’s depictions of jovial bonding seeped into the ways he imagines his own experiences as he eats the food with his family? Maybe he’s thinking about how unlike that ritual his own meal is, which means he’s still locating his experience around the branded imagery.

Maybe when a parent returns home late after another evening drenched in work, he’ll say something like “hey, we had Burger King together and you missed it.”

Because when a company brands a ritual, it’s not difficult to imagine that imagery informing/coloring lived experience in some way, even if it’s in the form of active resistance.

The dude who posted the pic labeled it “Delusional Burger King.” But I think Burger King was on the right track. After all, who are we but a collection of really awesome delusions?