Ron was the print production man at Scali Toronto. The joists in his house strained under groaning shelves filled with books and the stacks of magazines and catalogues that covered every available bit of floor space. He simply couldn’t bring himself to part with anything that was printed and bound. Which is a sound trait in a print production man.
I share Ron’s obsession although I do cull the magazines occasionally, because I’m of that tiny school that believes a well crafted paragraph is worth a thousand pictures. So naturally I’m distressed by the announcement that the OED may soon cease to be printed. I own an inordinate number of the things, Pockets, Concises, Minis, the misleadingly named Compact. My initial reaction is to carp on like a bad version of the Pythons’ Four Yorkshiremen (a word that that if spell-check would only consult the OED, it would find is perfectly acceptable as indicated by the swing dash in the entry under Yorkshire). But the heaps of remaindered copies in bookshop bins once “back-to-school” sales are over offer bald testament to the economic reality.
I’ll get used to it. I don’t miss the encyclopaedia, I certainly don’t miss the phone book, or for the most part maps, although I do love Ordnance Survey maps (which as far as I know are unique to the UK) even though I haven’t done a lot of orienteering in the last 40 years. Unexpectedly I haven’t missed newspapers, finding that access to a whole world of newspapers provides an infinitely more extensive, entertaining and rounded view of current affairs.
In any event, in a few years the printed word will be yet another in an endless series of ‘retro’ fads that fill the digital emptiness and my broken backed copies of the OED will be fashionable accessories.
So this weasel faced bloke comes into the office and says: “ Look, I done it but I got a bang up alibi and a moody moniker.” To which some lawyers might have responded: “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that Mr. Weasel. Now let’s start again.”
On receiving the disappointing news that we could either plead guilty on his behalf, otherwise he should consult another firm, the weasel slammed out of the office forcefully questioning our sexual orientation and parentage as he went.
The excellent chaps and chapettes at Grip Ltd’s Bigorangeslide blog posed a very big question last week: What is the role of morality in advertising? There’s an argument (forcefully propounded in the film The Corporation) that all business is by definition amoral. In a capitalist system a company’s primary (some might say only) responsibility is to its shareholders. If it’s legal and it’s a sound business proposition for the company, then the two fundamental decision criteria have been met.
Blood diamonds, heroin chic, nefarious tobacco tactics, dodgy drug trials, environmental degradation, trans fat laden foods, cheap child labour, sub-prime lending, sanctions busting, dealings with homicidal dictators, callously indifferent safety practices: these days it’s hard to think of a category that doesn’t carry the whiff of moral turpitude or at least indifference.
Which is to say that if you are in the habit of thinking deeply about such things and you can’t deal with some degree of moral ambiguity, then you should probably take holy orders. No? Right. OK, run for parliament – nope strike that. Something other than business anyway.
Some big thinkers believe it’s time to re-think the entire system. Umair Haque writes prolifically about what he calls ‘thin value’, the essential imbalance between the value that commerce puts in to society and what it takes out. Matthew Taylor at the RSA suggests that it’s time to re-examine 17th and 18th century “enlightenment” values, conceived at the dawn of the industrial age and which continue to underpin our political and economic philosophy.
Whether or not you agree with these estimable gents’ specific assessments of where things stand, the issues they raise offer compelling reasons why perhaps one of the fundamental issues in business today is that it lacks a relevant, contemporary moral framework within which to operate.
Most of us have neither the desire nor the intellectual force to take on such monumental challenges. Besides, there’s plenty to keep us occupied just being caring spouses, responsible parents and diligent workers. There is a necessary element of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in our individual compacts with an imperfect world.
The day I started working on a very large and very difficult account, the head of the account group sat me down. He’s a cockney (the real thing – a “born within the sound of Bow bells” cockney). His counsel to me went something like this: “It’s the toughest account you’ll ever work on and they can be right pricks. That’s just the way it is. If you can’t handle that then you should leave now. But one day they may do something that’s over the line for you as a human being, in which case – tell ‘em to fuck off.”
There’s no right or wrong answer to the question of morality in business, it’s about each individual’s broader beliefs. Which is why we need to look beyond the four walls of the office and the narrow conventions of our industry for answers to the questions that really matter.
For a time my welfare was entirely in the hands of Lt. Col. A.H.G. Morle, MBE, TD, BA. Tall and reed thin, balding, with a trim gingery moustache, he might have walked off a set at Ealing Studios or sprung from the pages of an early Le Carré novel. He was the master ‘I/C’ the junior boarding house at my exceptionally minor public school.
Later on, during my short and tragic legal career, the firm’s letterhead was festooned with the partners’ titles and qualifications – Brig. Sir Arthur Anachronism, V.C. (and bar), M.A. (Cantab.) – that sort of thing.
Listing ranks and accomplishments was simply something people did back then, much of it I suspect to confirm having done one’s bit biffing Jerry. It certainly wasn’t much of a signifier in terms of personality; they might be predictably pompous arseholes or, like Harry Morle, unexpectedly kind and thoughtful.
Thirty years on, such puffery is a sure mark of the beast (or at any rate a beast). On noticing that a new client sported letters after his name – on business cards, correspondence, emails – I knew that this was a relationship destined to end badly. And it wasn’t just the fact of the initials, but the dread designation itself, a dubious distinction, in fact thoroughly discredited in some quarters.
Ivor T. Watting, MBA (not his real name natch) didn’t disappoint. I suspect the silly sod had spent considerable time and cash on correspondence courses from the University of Sidcup or some such institute of dubious repute (except in the annals of matchbook marketing). He might as well have had a PhD in elf husbandry for all the marketing savvy he’d gleaned. Nonetheless, combined with a capricious nature, a threatening demeanour and an unerring talent for offending any audience with a supremely tasteless joke, it was sufficient to cow those whose livelihoods he held in the balance.
Today, pretentious displays of self-importance are thankfully confined to the pretentiously self-important. In our more egalitarian age you are what you drive and where you live; you’re only as big as your bonus and your boat, as indispensible as the parachute you negotiate, as immortal as the number of hospital wings your name is on.
Ivor T. Watting MBA remains sadly unaware that the world has moved on to more substantive displays of self-importance and that the only information those letters after his name now impart is “Ivor Small Willy”.
Until now I had thought Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy’s atavistic novel of men gone feral, could never be surpassed for its sheer nauseating violence. That was until I began reading Robert Fagles’ utterly engrossing translation of Homer’s The Iliad.
The blind bard evokes the shattering violence of Bronze Age warfare in a way that goes far beyond mere cinematic gore; the poet places us at the instant before death as the spear tip smashes through teeth, slices out the tongue and tears through the back of the neck. The relentless, grinding slaughter and mutilation leave you exhausted.
Arrogant, prideful Agamemnon, the sybarite Paris, stolid Hector, Nestor the warrior sage, the lovely, self-loathing Helen, sulky superhero Achilles, the mighty tactician and orator Odysseus; and always, the petulant, scheming and shape shifting immortals of Olympus. After nearly three millennia this peerless epic with its magnificent cast of characters still has much to tell us about the glory and the ghastliness of our unchanging flawed humanity.
Creative chap that Homer.
I don’t happen to think creativity and art are the same thing. All artists are creative people, but not all creative people are necessarily capable of producing art. However, in my experience, someone who is creative (which is also not synonymous with having mastered a craft) comes at things obliquely. They process information differently from the rest of us. And bore through the crud, straight to the essence of what is at issue (hence much of the antipathy that creative people in advertising feel for strategic people). And because they see things differently, they express what they see in a way that is unique, and thus arresting, to ordinary mortals.
So when people rabbit on about the need to ‘redefine creativity’ I get really agitated; such fundamental ignorance of the human condition is disquieting. This piece in AdAge got me particularly churned up. The writer suggests that – what else – the internet demands a redefinition of creativity.
Technology may have progressed somewhat since Linear B symbols were painstakingly inscribed on clay tablets, and changes in the means of transmitting creative expression have resulted in changes to the form and craft associated with its communication. But the nature of creativity and the universally beguiling nature of an idea expressed creatively is the same now as it ever was.
We may have to redefine what it is we need creative people to create, but to suggest that technology can redefine creativity is as silly as suggesting that dying in battle has been redefined because your vital organs are ripped apart by a bullet rather than a spear.
Professor Eric Clemons has an article on TechCrunch. Its central premise is that the Internet is “shattering advertising”. Doctor C. is Professor of Operations and Information Management at Wharton, which frankly bodes ill for the value of his insights into advertising. Perhaps he spent 20 years at the feet of Bill Bernbach or Leo Burnett prior to his current post, if so, he learned astonishingly little.
Professor Clemons’ Argument #1: There must be something other than advertising
The header suggests he bears more than just an academic grudge against advertising, however the arguments that follow it have little or nothing to do with the headline (so if he was in advertising he was likely an art director).
As with so many, who know so little about advertising, yet have so much to say about it, he confuses medium with message. He cites declining newspaper ad volumes as a memento mori for advertising in general. Declining advertising volumes reflect falling readership due to the diminished relevance of the form or the content or both. So, while newspapers specifically might be losing their appeal to advertisers as a vehicle for their ad messages, this says nothing whatever about the value of advertising as a marketing tool. He deploys similar illogic with regard to Internet advertising. Even if, as he avers, the Internet is proving to be an ineffective medium for the transmission of advertising, this again says nothing about the value of advertising in itself.
Professor Clemons’ Argument #2: Advertising will fail
Well you can’t be clearer than that can you? As a basis for his argument he proposes a definition of advertising:
“Advertising is using sponsored commercial messages to build a brand and paying to locate these messages where they will be observed by potential customers performing other activities; these messages describe a product or service, its price or fundamental attributes, where it can be found, its explicit advantages, or the implicit benefits from its use.”
And there we have it ladies and gents, this Doc knows dick all whereof he speaks. His definition is devoid of any reference to the emotional component of advertising, which as even the janitor and the mailroom boy at any self-respecting agency know, is in fact the working component. The rational stuff is a screen (once referred to in strategies as the “permission to believe” in acknowledgment of the fact that the recipient is predisposed to accept the deeper emotive premise if it’s relevant), either that, or it’s reluctantly inserted to satisfy a pedantic client.
If you want to definitively suggest that advertising will die, then you have to contend that the entire concept of ‘fashion’, in its broadest sense, will die. Advertising is a primary signifier to the target of a product’s popular appeal. It helps her or him determine whether or not that product is acceptable in the context of his or her social cohort.
Doc Clemons (in company with those other non-practicing advertising experts before him, Doc Searls*, Dave Winer and Jeff Jarvis each enlightening in their field, it’s just that their fields are not advertising) envision a dreary and mechanistic world in the future wherein all purchases are based on cold, rational analysis.
“What are you having gents?” “We’ll have a bio-chemical analysis of each of your draught beers thank you barkeep”
Spend a week or two in the real world Doc, the one with suburban sprawl, a crossover in every driveway and shopping malls crammed with Coach and La Senza and Apple stores and you’ll soon realise this is not coming to pass any time soon. The millennial in my household (21 year old, beer drinking, iPod wearing, Xbox playing, 3-screen viewing, male university student/chick magnet and sports nut) has the adidas “Impossible is nothing” screed as his screen saver and regularly updates me on the latest Old Spice and Dos Equiis executions. The target remains attentive.
Professor Clemons’ Argument #3: Advertising will fail for three reasons
Reason a): [and the most facile of all the old saws] consumers don’t trust advertising.
Doc, they never did. What’s to trust? Unless there’s genuine information to communicate, such as a discount, the information in ads is an irrelevance. Scientists, salesmen, academics and data geeks all get dreadfully agitated with the fact that brand advertising is irrational. To the plodding empiricist, the economist and the political pollster alike, emotive forces in human behaviour are exasperatingly inexplicable and inconvenient. The same way the appeal of fictional stories, however they’re delivered (book, song, internet, movie), is inexplicable. They are made up. They contain no immediately usable information. Well, advertising is simply the creation of fictions that tell people something largely non rational but nonetheless sympathetic, about products.
Reason b) [and the second most facile of the old saws] consumers don’t want to view advertising
The VCR, the PVR, the internet and the need to go to for a slash mid way through your favourite TV show have all in their time been hailed as foreshadowing the “death of TV ads”. Yet TV advertising has never been stronger (the AdContrarian assiduously reports the numbers if you care to check specifics).
Reason c) Consumers don’t need advertising
Doc, they never did. Neither do they need $80 jeans when Wal-Mart sells perfectly serviceable denim trow for $25. I once asked an unconscionably wealthy friend whether the Mercedes sports convertible he had just bought was front or rear wheel drive. He hadn’t the faintest idea. A purely emotional purchase for a little shy of six figures.
No one likes to admit they buy things because others do. Or because it says something about them. But we all do it. And so advertising occupies an ambivalent place in our lives: on the one hand it’s a helpful tool to suggest what the cool crowd is buying; on the other, no one in their right mind would ever admit to buying what the cool crowd buys. So it should come as very little surprise then that when asked, no one ever needs, wants, trusts, looks at, or is influenced in any way, by advertising.
There’s a lot more ill-informed piffle in the article but this post is already way too long (even for me). Sorry about that, but there are just way too many armchair admen these days.
*Please note that I am mistaken in suggesting that Doc Searls does not have experience in advertising. As he points out in the comments below, he was in the business for some 20 years.
I was quaffing a few ales at Grumpy Park with a chap who runs manufacturing operations in Canada for a pharma company. He’s been interviewing “facilities management” companies. Apparently, these companies take over everything involved in simply running the buildings: mowing the lawns, buying the bog roll, hiring the overweight security guards, sourcing the sausage and mash for the caff, finding the officious pricks to man the car park and so on.
Companies spend millions (hundreds of millions in his case) on this crap before a single pill or bottle of beer or tampon or toaster strudel ever gets made. Hiring someone to take it off your hands seems like a bloody good idea.
But buying bog rolls and sausages with a half-life of centuries is just what procurement departments were created to do. So these outsource companies are undoubtedly a bit of a threat, what with their purchasing power in slightly-used urinal pucks and stir sticks. Which is probably why procurement has horned in on agency pitches.
In a recent article in AdAge this chap, who is something of a procurement kahuna, attempts to ameliorate some of the concerns arising from the influence of procurement departments in hiring ad agencies. He suggests it’s really just a question of finance getting a “solid grasp on the world of agencies, marketing and marketing procurement”. Yep. Just like genning up on biochemistry and scoring a bargain head of R&D.
For the most part ad agencies comprise similar people with similar backgrounds, training and experience. The difference between agencies lies in which aspects of the business they emphasise: planning, creative, media, being order takers, etc. This will dictate the people they hire, their methods, and the quality and nature of their ultimate output. Marketing people generally have a bias towards one type or another.
Those who favour the agency-as-order-taker model for example will be looking for oleaginous agency presidents who can switch deeply held convictions at the first whiff of dissent without blinking and whose employees patently understand they are but one client complaint away from being shit-canned. Then it’s simply a question of which president is likely to entertain the most lavishly and which set of employees display the most bovine qualities. Otherwise known as “chemistry”.
There is a simple, time tested way for finance to control the amount of money spent on advertising and the agency. It’s called a budget. Then you can leave the marketing dicks to find the kind of agency that will do what they need them to do and you can get back to looking for a good deal on floor wax.
03 Aug
Posted by simon as Uncategorized
Shit
Piss
Fuck
Cunt
Cocksucker
Motherfucker
Tits
This of course from George Carlin’s legendary routine Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV, a live performance of which got him arrested in Milwaukee back in the dark ages. Note the meticulous scansion, Carlin was a pro.
And nearly forty years on uttering those words on mainstream TV will still bring down a shit storm of fines, media exile, and intimations of the coming apocalypse from the Christ-caucus. Perhaps by now “shit”, “piss” and/or “tits” have been passed for post-watershed viewers. Or maybe “shit” and “piss” as expletives but not verbs. It’s difficult to know where you stand with such finely calibrated opprobrium.
Of course the advent of social media renders this all rather quaint, when in twitter and blog worlds, expletive repeated is more the order of the day. Particularly in the UK, where obscenity has been elevated to Homeric heights. Well, free speech innit.
Which is why watching clients and agencies searching desperately for their “twitter strategies” (or any social media strategies come to that) is so entertaining. Clients are such prudes.
Advertising (call it what you will, it’s all advertising) works by adapting to the medium in which it exists. Hence we spend inordinate sums of money to create entertaining little films for entertainment media such as television and cinema (at least we do for the 0.1% of clients who actually grasp that rather basic fact).
Social media has churned up any number of entertaining faux tweeters and bloggers from Dr. Johnson, to fake Steve Jobs to celebrity knock offs and of course, for us marketing types, the client every client wishes they could be, the indefatigable Dave Knockles (@daveknockles). In fact if Dave Knockles had been the social media creation of a brand that trades on irreverence (FCUK, alco-pops, whatever) they might have had a social media hit on their hands.
Yet marketers continue to believe that they can “engage” the proles with turgid torrents of dull information or invitations to help them do their fucking job. TAC has a couple of perfect examples of just how turgid even putatively sophisticated marketers can be here.
Escape Pod’s work for Wheat Thins and W+K’s for Old Spice demonstrate that there are terrific possibilities for occasionally hijacking social media with an interesting idea.
But the fact is that for the most part there’s nothing so interesting about a product or company or their employees that merits their daily pissing in the twitterstream. They may have to revert to the dread “borrowed interest”. And pretty prurient interest at that.
“…to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.” The M’Naghten Rules, 1843
One of the joys of studying law in a common law jurisdiction is the brilliant clarity with which extraordinarily complicated ideas eventually come to be expressed. Continuous refinement by way of judicial precedent over the course of centuries can to do that.
The M’Naghten Rules, which still govern the defence of insanity in criminal cases, are atypical in that they were drawn up by a panel of judges at the request of the Law Lords after some berk named M’Naghten, intending to assassinate Prime Minister Robert Peel, shot his secretary instead. Despite some archaic syntax, they distill a fraught and freighted conundrum into gloriously unambiguous principles: Was the accused suffering from a “disease of the mind”? Did he know what he was doing? If he did, did he know it was wrong?
Admittedly things get a bit less crystalline after that. Does a skull banging, brain crushing, steamroller of a hangover for instance, count as a disease of the mind? (It does not.) But the issues up for discussion are perfectly proscribed even if the potential for refining them remains almost limitless.
Which makes me wonder why in the communications business we seem to try and frame new ideas and thinking as opaquely as possible.
Right now ‘latency’ is all the rage, the Old Spice campaign being the quintessential demonstration of a seemingly complicated concept known as ‘low cultural latency’. Unhappily, the complexity derives less from the concept (the speed at which something achieves popular notoriety) than from tortuous linguistics. From its original sense (which already has currency in marketing speak) of something that exists but is not evident, ‘latency’ has metamorphosed into a calibration of the length of time between a cause and an effect.
Not to single out cultural latency for any other reason than it’s conveniently to hand. The phenomenon itself is indisputably germane with potentially enormous ramifications for brand marketers.
The accelerated rate at which things now become absorbed into the collective cultural noggin appears to have the equal and opposite effect of rendering those same things, just as rapidly, old hat. So that in an environment of ‘low cultural latency’ (a rather counter-intuitive rendering of rapid cultural absorption) brand building options may begin to polarise between doing something so spectacularly memorable as to be inextricably associated with it (the ‘Mel Gibson’ strategy) or a continuing stream of lesser activities that will keep it top of mind with hoi poloi (the “Lindsay Lohan” approach).
Faris and Cake (great name for a new agency BTW) both write about it far more cogently here and here.
One of the most irritating aspects of the one word presentation slide and the spread of ideas 140 characters at a time is that while jargon and catchy maxims proliferate like malapropisms in a Sarah Palin speech the real ideas behind them tend to get lost in the process.
Ironically the term ‘low cultural latency’ may well fall victim to the very phenomenon it describes as account planners, social media gurus and agency cleaning ladies all blag on about it at every available opportunity and clients’ glaze over at yet another Power Point cliché.
Here at Grumpy Park, I’ve been trying to write about the Enlightenment for a few days now – those heavy drinkers immortalised in Eric Idle’s Philosophers’ Song: “Emmanuel Kant was a real pissant…” etc.
I’ve discovered that philosophy is actually quite fucking difficult – particularly when pissed – it makes brain surgery seem like, well, advertising.
Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the 250 year-old Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has just released a pamphlet (download here) that is in effect the prospectus for this venerable institution’s future direction and which is encapsulated, as he describes it, in the strap line: “21st century enlightenment” (I think chewing gum and tampons should have ‘strap lines’, not venerable institutions but anyway…).
It’s an awfully big adventure he’s embarking upon. The ideas of men like Locke, Hobbes, Mill, Rousseau, Kant, et al provide the philosophical underpinning for many of our contemporary beliefs about government, ethics, markets, and the fundamental freedoms, rights and responsibilities of the citizen. Mr. Taylor’s goal is to foster a reassessment of those philosophical tenets in the context of the 21st century.
He groups the myriad issues and contradictions under three main headings, which correspond to major themes of Enlightenment thought:
1. Issues relating to individual autonomy: reconciling individual autonomy with the public good, addressing the increasing dearth of connectedness between the individual and the context in which the individual exists; acknowledging demonstrable discrepancies between certain aspects of human cognition and reality and recognizing that human thought is a complex blend of emotion and reason (for example he points to the Daily Mail’s over-reliance on the visceral response to sell papers); distinguishing between needs and appetites and human potential and potentially self defeating aspiration. His notion of “positional goods” i.e. that we value goods not on their intrinsic merit but rather on what others have, goes to the very root of our beliefs about value and what is valuable, not to mention the drivers of our current conception of positive economic growth.
2. Issues relating to universalism (or empathic universalism): the balance between freedom and welfare, individual rights and community well-being, national interests and international concerns. He suggests that empathic capacity is a core competency for a 21st century citizen if we are to address such problems as multiculturalism, ethnic tensions and global economic disparities. He provides evidence both for an innate human capacity for empathy as well as indications that the growth of empathy over the past three centuries might be showing signs of stalling.
3. Issues relating to the ethics of progress: which he further sub-divides under the rubric of the prevailing ‘logics’ of science (if it can be discovered or developed it should be), markets (if it can be sold it should be), and bureaucracy (the emphasis of means over ends). In some ways exploring the definitions and goals of progress raises the most profound questions of all. What kind of a future do we really want? What is the nature of a purposeful life? As he puts it, one ruled by social convention and economic convenience – or some other ideal of the life fully lived?
In effect seeking a 21st century version of Enlightenment principles means questioning the very essence of what we believe is a good or virtuous life, our definitions and evaluative criteria for scientific, economic and social progress and the roles and responsibilities of the citizen in the 21st century.
He attributes the debasement of the political sphere to the importation of the methods and competition-driven ethics of the commercial realm. Whatever the causes, there is very evidently a vacuum in leadership when it comes to the real questions of what sort of a society we want to build.
Perhaps it’s because both governments and the governed would rather avoid the hard questions about actions and consequences, or contemplate the prospect of profound change in the way we live, that we can only ever achieve superficial solutions to crises as diverse as the environment, terror, poverty, economic instability and the ineffectiveness of government and institutions.
It’s important work that Mr. Taylor and the RSA are contemplating. I for one would happily serve as the tea boy or mixer of philosophers’ cocktails if it would help in furthering the cause.
Thanks to Neil Perkin for pointing me in this direction when he wrote about the RSA’s ambitions here. I suspect I may have unintentionally repeated a lot of what Neil has already said. Sorry about that, but it probably bears repeating.
The only thing worse than social media cant is brand cant. Not every client is seduced by the siren call of the social media harpies, but every client has a brand. Brand cant is insidious.
This bloke took a few too many hits of acid back in the day and the flashbacks just keep on coming. To understand whether you have a brand or merely a label he says:
Take the T-shirt test
Quick test: check that T-shirt you’re wearing. Is it taking you somewhere you’d never reach without it? Or is it just following you around? If it’s leading you somewhere special, and your feet just skim the ground, you’re wearing a brand. Otherwise, you’re stitched to a label.
But wait, that’s not all:
Brands open doors—big ones. They help us interoperate with the universe.
Now this brand cant is so patently cant that I doubt many clients will pay it any attention.
Years ago, I convinced a brewery client to part with an enormous amount of dosh to bring a highly recommended research company over from Paris. The head research bint opened the presentation of her findings (in French with simultaneous translation by her husband who was a dead ringer for Frédéric Chopin) with a dissertation on the transition to the Age of Aquarius. Most of the clients buggered off long before she ever got to the stuff about the brand.
But yer man with his t-shirt test, while on the wacko fringe of brand cant is part of a more widespread thesis that brands should go all Deepak Chopra on us.
I am very fond of my John Deere tractor. I even wear my “Owners’ Edition” hat. I’m fond of it not because it helps me to interoperate with the universe, but because it helps me interoperate with the considerable quantity of lawn and tree stumps at Grumpy Park. Because it is tough as a tank and because the blokes at the dealership are unfailingly jolly and helpful.
My John Deere doesn’t improve my life, it does what it’s fucking well supposed to do for its considerably premium price. And that my new age friends, is the secret to a successful brand.