Books, Meet Your Future: Our Choice App

If happiness is about managing expectations, then books are seriously stoked right now.

We humans were promised hoverboards and self-lacing Nikes and our bitterness knows no limits. But thanks to Push Pop Press and former Vice President Al Gore, books can rest assured that their evolution is in safe hands.

The book-app they created provides an immersive experience that brings Our Choice, Gore’s book about the solutions to climate change, to full digital life. With all the interactive multimedia (photos, video, audio, geolocation), the experience more closely resembles game play than reading.

Frankly, the environmental movement needed this shot in the arm. It has been on life support recently.

When Apple first launched the iPhone and iPad, the company messaged the products as magical and revolutionary. I now understand that positioning as less hyperbole and brand braggadocio than a statement about the promise and potential that others would help them fulfill.

Through this app, the iPad’s potential is being realized.

Oh, and by the way. The crisis of climate change is, in fact, real. And there are solutions. Alas, only if more legislators could get their hands on a iPad and take less crazy pills.
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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- Matthew DiGirolamo

Hosting Howard Schultz with Peet’s Coffee

I had a chance to attend the Los Angeles leg of Howard Schultz’s national book tour this morning for “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul” (thanks, Larry Benet).

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m a big admirer of Schultz’s leadership style and corporate vision. No executive is better at communicating core values and articulating the importance of balancing profit motive and purpose motive.  Whenever I hear him speak — and today was no exception — I’m struck by his authenticity and conviction. You can tell that he leads with his truth and believes in the values his company stands for.

That said, nobody that incisive can escape a touch of perfectionism. I suspect he is a perfectionist (we can sniff out our own) and I know he is a brand control freak so it must have just killed him that the event producers served Peet’s Coffee during the pre-event reception. Yes, that’s right. They hosted Howard Schultz with Peet’s Coffee.

Everyone was whispering about it. Not sure who should have caught that minor detail, except for everyone working on the event in any capacity. I even overheard a member of the security team joking about it with an usher while people were filing into the auditorium.

Someone asked Schultz about the oversight during the Q&A session, and he said exactly what I was expecting, “When I saw that they were serving Peet’s Coffee, I almost turned around and left.”

Schultz spoke about the word “love” today and what it means for someone to love what they do, to love the company they work for, to love a brand and what it stands for.

When it comes to brand management, love is in the details. You just can’t miss those kind of details.
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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- Matthew DiGirolamo

Banding Together Against Rebranding

In the wake of Starbucks announcing its new logo, followed by yet another brouhaha, The Economist explores why consumers seem to uniformly despise rebranding efforts:

One answer is that people have a passionate attachment to some brands. They do not merely buy clothes at Gap or coffee at Starbucks, but consider themselves to belong to “communities” defined by what they consume. A second reason is that the more choices people have, the more they seem to value the familiar. These days there are so many choices available to Western consumers—the average supermarket stocks 30,000 items and America’s patent and trademark office issues some 200,000 patents a year—that they are in danger of being overwhelmed. Homo economicus may be capable of carefully considering all available products…

The debate about logos reveals something interesting about power as well as passion. Much of the rage in the blogosphere is driven by a sense that “they” (the corporate stiffs) have changed something without consulting “us” (the people who really matter). This partly reflects a hunch that consumers have more power in an increasingly crowded market for goods. But it also reflects the sense that brands belong to everyone, not just to the corporations that nominally control them.

Companies have gone out of their way to encourage these attitudes. They not only work hard to create emotional bonds with consumers (Victoria’s Secret is one of many firms, including The Economist, that encourage customers to “like” them on Facebook). They involve them in what used to be regarded as internal corporate operations. Snapple asks Snapple-drinkers to come up with ideas for new drinks. Threadless encourages people to compete to design T-shirts.

I wonder: Is the recent string of logo redesign flops (see also here and here) more about poor rollout communications strategy than about the logos themselves?

Since building a strong brand naturally requires the customer — it develops through daily top down and bottom up exchanges — why wouldn’t rebranding proceed in the same way?

I think it’s now becoming essential for communications plans to identify appropriate ways to engage, and tap into the passion of, their loyalists through key stages of the rebranding process if they are to secure buy-in.

Go read all about it.
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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Starbucks Siren: Iconic Enough to Stand Alone?

Howard Schultz today unveiled the new Starbucks visual identity (photo above) in a corporate blog entitled Looking Forward to Starbucks Next Chapter.

Throughout the last four decades, the Siren has been there through it all. And now, we’ve given her a small but meaningful update to ensure that the Starbucks brand continues to embrace our heritage in ways that are true to our core values and that also ensure we remain relevant and poised for future growth.

I understand the desire to open up the brand to give “Starbucks Coffee” the flexibility to expand its business beyond coffee, but why not leave the name “Starbucks” and drop “Coffee” from the logo for this new/next iteration.

I feel like the company went too far, too fast.

In terms of the brand hierarchy, I would say the Siren is only the third most important — or iconic — aspect of the company’s visual identity. I think it ranks behind the name Starbucks and the logo’s unmistakable shade of green.

While I like the modern “update” they’ve made to the Siren, and understand the desire to have it stand on its own as an icon, I think it still needs to be scaffolded by the Starbucks name for the time being.

It’s not a strong enough mark yet to stand out, stand alone, or stand in for the Starbucks brand.

What do you think? Is the Starbucks Siren iconic enough to stand alone?
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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Groupon: Get to Selfless Ends By Selfish Means

The Wall Street Journal’s Bari Weiss spent some time with Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason and wrote a flattering profile on the company.

Two key takeaways for all social marketers and entrepreneurs:

1. Build a business model, an organizational culture, and customer relationships — in other words, a brand — around one clear, essential organizing principle. For Apple, one could easily say that the company stands for revolutionary design. I was impressed by how well Andrew Mason was able to articulate what Groupon was fundamentally about at such an early stage: surprise. It’s the sign of a visionary leader.

Irreverence is part of daily life in the downtown office. Last Wednesday, someone brought a monkey dressed in a Santa suit. This past summer, Mr. Mason paid a male actor to strut around the office in a tutu for a week—totally mute. Less outrageously, the company has no dress code and no vacation policy, which Mr. Mason credits to Netflix.

“The way people think about jobs, the nine to five . . . it’s the same routine over and over again,” he says. “Groupon as a company—it’s built into the business model—is about surprise. A new deal that surprises you every day. We’ve carried that over to our brand, in the writing and the marketing that we do, and in the internal corporate culture.”

2. Groupon started — and failed — as a social action platform. It was a big idea, but it was too big, too abstract, too idealistic. Groupon caught fire once it focused on satisfying a basic “selfish” need that people already had (to save money on things they want to buy) in a social way. Because it has become a powerful business platform that enables “collective buying power” among millions of users, Groupon can now be used as a powerful change-making platform. In Andrew Mason’s words, “the world-changing ends up being a side-effect.” Groupon’s $15 for a $25 Kiva loan deal was a notable example of its potential to be a force for good.

Like so many other successful tech ventures, Groupon grew out of an earlier, less successful idea. ThePoint.org was a website for organizing campaigns like protests or fund-raising drives. And, like Groupon, it was built around the tipping point concept: The campaign was only carried out if enough people committed.

But ThePoint never took off. “The big problem with ThePoint is that it’s this huge, abstract idea. You can use this platform to do anything from boycotting a multinational company to getting 20% off a subscription to the Economist,” says Mr. Mason, who dropped out of the University of Chicago’s master’s program in public policy to build ThePoint with $1 million investment from Eric Lefkofsky, a former boss and serial investor who later helped found Groupon.

One lesson Mr. Mason learned is that for a site to be successful, it needs to be simple and easy to use. ThePoint, says Mr. Mason “was overly complex and we needed to pick . . . one application of the larger abstract idea and execute it really, really well.”

Another was a broader lesson about the nature of do-gooder ventures. “One of the things I realized . . . is how few success stories there are in websites or products or businesses that exist primarily for an altruistic purpose. Most of the time, the things that really change the world exist for something fundamentally selfish and then the world-changing ends up being a side-effect of that. Whether its Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or Twitter, all those things have made the world better by the way that they allow people to share information. But that’s not why they were created. It was so they could share pictures and videos of scantily clad women or kittens or whatever. And Groupon’s the same way. And it caught me by surprise.”

Full article here.

-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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Why CNN=Politics Is Not A Smart Brand Statement

With Larry King’s CNN career coming to a close tonight after 25 years, and the network experiencing its worst ratings year ever, I’ve been thinking through discussions I’ve had with people recently about the CNN brand and the way it plays out in practice through its programming.

For starters, I’ve never liked “CNN=Politics” as a brand statement. A few colleagues I respect greatly have argued in private conversations that CNN is a “well branded” media company and that the equals politics formula positions the network as the go-to source for political news and coverage, particularly during prime-time election seasons.

While I admire how CNN has been disciplined and consistent in the execution of that brand statement, I actually think it does more harm than good.

And here’s my logic. I like music, generally speaking, but what really excites me is hearing a new album, learning some tour news, or seeing a live show from The National or Arcade Fire, my favorite bands.

While I like sports of all kinds, and will casually watch most televised sporting events if I have extra time on my hands, I am intensely passionate about the Los Angeles Lakers and the New York Giants, my favorite teams.

And the same goes for politics. People may take an interest in politics, but they are more likely to be fired up by their chosen political party, their favorite political personality, or a specific point of view that they subscribe to.

General interest is not a strong enough driver in today’s digital world where information is a cheap commodity, available anywhere and everywhere. To be successful now — and success is defined as increasing ratings and advertising dollars, which is about audience loyalty and depth of engagement — you must specialize. You must have a strong point of view. You must take a stand. You must cater to a well defined audience. You must tap into a tribal identity. You must focus everything you broadcast through a sharp lens.

Trying to be all things for all people, toeing the middle line, and owning an entire category (i.e. CNN=Politics) is a recipe for mediocrity and, ultimately, failure. At the very least, it only inspires yawns. The middle ground only worked when accessing and reaching audiences was monopolized by a few major newspapers and television channels.

Reaching general audiences is no longer enough to create lasting value for a media brand. Cultivating a targeted audience, burning them up, and turning them into deeply engaged fans and followers is where programming needs to be focused.

But it’s not surprising that CNN just issued a statement ahead of the year-end Nielsen’s ratings that emphasized its total reach, which is really just a happy face on a sad clown. By all metrics that matter, CNN doesn’t inspire the same loyalty, the same passion, the same intense following as its competitors, FOX News and MSNBC.

While CNN has been busy standing for politics, FOX News and MSNBC have been standing strong for conservative and progressive values, respectively. MSNBC’s new “Lean Forward” branding campaign shows they get where the industry needs to move:

To lean forward is to think bigger, listen closer, fight smarter, and act faster. To celebrate the best ideas, no matter where they come from. To dare to dream of a nation that’s better tomorrow than it is today.

This progressive mission statement of sorts helps MSNBC stake a contrary position, establish a relevant point of view, and push back against FOX News’s conservative worldview. We can argue separately about whether this move away from a neutral, middle ground media position is good for our country and our democracy.

But one thing is for sure: the bland middle is fast becoming a media no man’s land and a bad place to make money.
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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Is Apple Anti-Social?

In the days leading up to Apple’s press conference last week, this video of a shorts and sandals-wearing Steve Jobs (circa ’97) introducing the Think Different campaign went viral. Perhaps the appropriate term is that it went bacterial. It was a fairly local outbreak. In a span of three days, I saw it appear on at least six different blogs I read regularly.

It really is a terrific look back at a company on the verge of reinventing itself — and a valuable primer on branding from a natural marketer. Jobs make three key points in this video:

1. “Marketing is about values…”

2. “Apple, at the core – its core value — is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better…”

3. “Values, core values, shouldn’t change…”

And so I ask: Has Apple changed its core values since this remarkable moment?

In 1997, Jobs articulated a radically progressive worldview. Under his leadership, Apple’s “soul” would be about empowering bold, creative, revolutionary people to “change things” and “push the human race forward”.

It seems to me, Jobs wanted to position Apple as a brand that offered a positive definition of freedom — a freedom to. To create. To take risks. To change the status quo. To mix it up. To blaze a trail. To be yourself. It was all about positive freedom.  All outward looking.

Success hasn’t been kind to this early vision, though.

The now infamous late night email exchange between Gawker’s Ryan Tate and an unfiltered Steve Jobs revealed how much of the CEO’s worldview has shifted since Apple’s underdog days.

Continue reading…

Levi’s Workshopping Brand Relevance

I love what Levi’s is doing with its Go Forth, Ready to Work campaign (creative above by Wieden+Kennedy, of course).

The campaign is being made concrete through old-school, pop-up community “workshops” debuting around the country (concept and execution by NYC-based Sub Rosa).

One just opened for business in the Mission District of San Francisco and it’s a brilliant strategic move for a classic American brand struggling to maintain its relevance.

The workshops are creative in the roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty kind of way. With its fully functional letterpress, screenprinting and typesetting equipment, along with its classes and “forums where local pioneers in design, sports, technology, sustainability can engage and collaborate,” the workshops are a celebration of the past in the spirit of modern, indie hipness.

It’s such a perfectly-branded interactive project.

Continue reading…

Colonel Sanders Has a Case of Pink Eye

So much criticism has already been heaped on KFC for its “Buckets for the Cure” cause marketing partnership with Susan G. Komen.

Various accusations of “pinkwashing” have come from cancer researchers, nutritional experts and other cause marketing analysts and there is no need to rehash them all here.

Yet as a communications strategist, I feel compelled to comment on an issue that I haven’t yet seen raised.

From my perspective, what helped the campaign rise to the level of absurdity was the terrible timing of KFC’s corporate communications.

Simply put, I’ve never seen a company’s brand message so poorly planned, managed and sequenced.

At its best, a cause marketing campaign is a story about a group of ordinary characters (a corporation, a charity, often a celebrity) who find their purpose motives aligned in some important way and decide to do something extraordinary together.

However, when it seems like one of the characters shouldn’t be in the story — when they appear out of nowhere or out of sequence — the whole narrative feels forced, inauthentic and inappropriate.

KFC became one of those characters.

Continue reading…

Promoting Purpose Pays Off

Yesterday, BrandWeek reported on yet another survey that showed that consumers are continuing to warm up to the idea of supporting companies for their good corporate citizenship.

The survey measured consumer perceptions of corporate social responsibility practices and ranked companies that are the most responsible. It found that despite the recession, 75% of consumers believe social responsibility is important, and 55% of consumers said they would choose a product that supports a particular cause against similar products that don’t.

“[Corporate social responsibility] can be the olive branch between struggling industries and consumers in cases where consumers are experiencing the highest expectations and the biggest let downs,” said Scott Osman, global director of Landor’s citizenship branding practice, adding that the industries with brands that have performed poorly, are the ones in which responsibility is valued most.

The survey results don’t surprise me, but I am shocked by Scott Osman’s clumsy “olive branch” analogy for corporate social responsibility practices.

CSR and cause marketing are not about companies offering after-the-fact peace treaties with the consumers they have been warring with for years.

That is a cynical and inauthentic use of cause marketing.

To be successful, a company must practice social responsibility because they want to inspire, enlist and engage audiences to join an important cause from the outset, not because they want to pacify and bait consumers into buying more products from a brand they’ve already been disappointed in.

Read the whole article here.
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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