I guess it's a sign of my having been in advertising literally my entire life, since my father was in it before me, and my uncle, his brother was in it before him. The fact is, someone in the Tannenbaum family has been making his slow way through the morass of the industry since the end of World War II. So, it's no wonder that I see advertising lessons nearly everywhere I look.
Of late, I've hit on something. It's an idea I can't shake. If anyone wants to talk about it--I'm all ears. My thinking right now is that nearly every company (and for that matter, person) engaged in branding is missing something fundamental, and is therefore getting things fundamentally wrong..
Brands, without question, in my lifetime, and especially with the emergence of fine design--which seems nearly ubiquitous now--are more sleek, streamlined and nicely designed than ever before. They're kerned and ligatured. They have beautiful color palettes. And somewhat inscrutable but still limbic nearly-cuneiform marks that are somehow supposed to imbue meaning into the brand.
Even airlines, ISPs, telcos and energy companies, who treat everything they touch, from customers to our planet, with disregard, disdain and dip-shititude, look good while they're acting badly.
I'm in an airport in Washington, DC, as I write this. The one I refuse to call by name, because I refuse to honor the president who called ketchup a vegetable and who sold arms to Iran illegally to finance illegal guerrillas in El Salvador. But that's all besides the point.
We think of a nation like Germany as an ancient one. After all, Romans were fighting "Germans" two-thousand years ago, but until the mid-19th Century, there was no Germany, there was a confederation of principalities with little national state apparatus. While France, Holland, England, Spain and Portugal were divvying up most of the world for their profit, various Germanic tribes were fighting amongst themselves.
Around the end of the Franco-Prussian war, say 1871, Germany consolidated and a monarchy was established. A long-mustachio'd monarchy, deeply conservative, restrictive and military in its bearing.
When WWI ended, the monarchy was finally ousted. The first German Republic--the First Reich was formed. An ex-barkeep--Friedrich Ebert, "the burly, affable, melancholic head of the Social Democrats," became Reich Chancellor.
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| I don't like facial hair. It makes most people look more ridiculous. |
Ebert served in that post--during a time as tumultuous as our time is now in amerika, with warring factions fighting (murderously) for power and control--from 1919 to 1925--a remarkable achievement considering how riven the new nation of Germany was. How wracked by hyper-inflation, the pressures of reparations, the demographic shifts of millions from the countryside to cities and the titanic battles between communists and extreme-right quasi-military, gun-toting freikorps troops looking to assert their will on the nation.
What got me thinking about all this in a blog on advertising, was the sentence below. When Ebert died (of a burst pancreas he was too stubborn to have treated) there was, as you'd expect, a state funeral. But here's the thing. The Reich, just six years old, had none of the accoutrements, semiotics or decorations of a state.
If an american potentate dies, we know what to do. It's happened many times before. We know what to do with flags, what music to play,, what clothing to wear, how to dress and behave. Germany had none of that. Yet, Jähner writes, "The impressive, moving funeral, which added an effective closing touch to the less than brilliant office of the late president, was a quiet triumph for a man who provided the aesthetic accoutrements of the short-lived Weimar Republic from start to finish."
And here's the bit that really hammers home the branding point:
"Not many people had survived all the confusions and changes of government as intact as Edwin Redslob, Reich Kunstwart and trained art historian. The curious-sounding office of ‘art guardian’ chiefly served the look of the Republic, from the design of the Reich eagle and the stamps via flags and orders to the organisation of the annual celebrations of the constitution and state funerals. We might mock this today, but for the young Republic the aesthetic of the state was not to be underestimated, because it had to provide something that would come even close to gripping the minds of the nation in the way that the pageantry of the German Empire, impelled by Kaiser Wilhelm’s hunger for prestige, had done."
What makes all this interesting to me is how meaningful and purposeful all this branding was. It wasn't just pangloss--like so much branding today--on top of cruddy service, a cruddy product and bland, disconnected performance.
All the pictures below show how the state itself was being built and asserting its place in people's lives.
When you're in an airport, or browsing online, or watching TV, every brand has a neato logo, and looks as friendly as a pap smear. In reality, everything quality and service-wise, sucks. As marketing practitioners, we've once again, conflated branding, with brand. And we've put all our money into decoration and none into how the brand performs.
I say this about 22 times a day.
Branding is a color system, a logo, maybe a tone-of-voice.
A brand is a million times more.
It's like I think Mark Twain once said, the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.
A brand is a promise.
We've forgotten the idea behind promises.
They're meant to be kept. Not just waved like a tired torn tattered flag.
Most branding uses people.
That's why so many of us spend parts of our days unsubscribing, literally and figuratively, to things we never subscribed to in the first place.
Brands are meant to keep promises.
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