What Would HBR Say?

When I worked on Mercedes-Benz in the middle-90s, the brand, at least to my eyes had been shaken to the core by the advent of Japanese “super-luxury” competitors.

Seemingly overnight, Mercedes no longer had the high-end of the car market to pretty much to themselves. All of a sudden they were being eaten alive by Infiniti, Acura and mostly mostly mostly Lexus. 

Because of vagaries of currency exchanges and because Lexus was backed by the deep-pockets of “can-do-no-wrong” Toyota, Lexus was selling a high-end sedan that looked very much like the Mercedes S-Class for about half the price of a less-reliable German car.

One way Mercedes responded to this aggressive threat was to broaden their product line. Quickly.

When I started on the brand in 1996, they offered the C-class, E-class, S-class and SL-class coupe. When I left in 1998, their line had more than doubled in size, from those four cars to if I remember right, a total of nine cars. They added a cheaper two-seater, a truck, a couple of coupes and more.

It was then I invented in my head what I’ll call for the purposes of this post “The Harvard Business Review Cover Test.” That is what would HBR say in ten years about this expansion.

1. “Mercedes. Losing its Stature Through Over-Expansion.” Or

2. “Mercedes. Finding New Customers By Expanding the Brand.”

The important thing here isn’t guessing the right answer. It’s to look at a brand like Joni Mitchell looked at clouds, “from both sides now.”

Playing this game of opposites is a good “war-gaming” exercise. It can help you think with what I call a constructive cantankerousness about a brand’s behavior and actions, or a market’s or an industry’s. 

Putting your contentiousness under the heading of a HBR cover shields you a bit from being considered a cynical asshole, as I’m regarded by so many. You’re not just being a nay-sayer, you’re intelligently thinking about what if the line everybody’s saying goes ’nay.’ Or ’nah.’ Or ‘heavens to mergatroid.’

In our partisan world today, where everything is dialectic and there’s no grey areas left (you’re either with us or against us) choices are often made that are absolute. When I was a boy, the Magic Marker sets art directors drew storyboards with had a variety of greys, allowing shading and nuance. Societally, we no longer have greys. The world is US vs. THEM.

What propelled this post (if it is in fact propelled) was a front page story in Saturday’s New York Times about the united states dropping a 2000-pound bomb in Iran that instead of hitting what militarists blithely call a “military target” hit a private home and killed three. 

I’ve read a lot in my life on wars.

If you enjoy history as I do and you read as I do, you get offered a lot of views of various battles. They’re more fun for historians to write about than a goatherd in the Zagros mountains. They’re often bloody and gripping if not consequential.

For about 3000 years, various entities fighting wars have been selling idiots like me the notion of precision bombing. We have all kinds of “smart” bombs now. Laser-guided bombs. Aerial-intelligence and more. We’re often sending our trillion dollars worth of planes off to lands 96% of our population couldn’t find on a map to conduct “surgical strikes.” 

The Greeks, Persians, Romans, Huns, Mongols and virtually every military force ever has promised their arrows or catapults are virtually un-erring.

The precision in precision bombing is an advertising term.

Just as the intelligence in artificial intelligence is an advertising term.

Just as the clean in clean energy is an advertising term.

So back to my HBR covers. 

1. “How America used coded language and destroyed truth and itself." Or

2. “How America woke up to being force-fed a constant onslaught of lies.”

I’m not sure HBR will be around long enough to write the real article. I’m not sure any of us will be.

Disinformation X 2.

Disinformation has a Soviet ring to it. With a sprinkling of Kafka. Wrapped in corporate PR. And shrouded in military-industrial complex.

Such is the prevalence of disinformation today—in every walk of life—and the success of disinformation today, that we seldom even hear the word anymore. 

People are too busy being “transparent” and “authentic.” 

That said, Google Ngram disagrees with me. (Ngram is a useful though flawed tool. It determines the frequency of a word, name or term’s usage in millions of books and articles.)

In any event, during my reading last night, I tripped over a nice, succinct definition of disinformation. It seemed precise and not loaded with its own politics. (I spend an hour a day with a genius. It not only helps my brain, it helps restore me after a day so elbow deep in contemporary reference-less dopeyness. And sports.) 

When your agency has lost its biggest accounts, about 80-percent of its revenue, and first over the last five years about 80-percent of its people and your website features this, that’s disinformation.

BTW, In 2017, Ogilvy/WPP had 203,000 employees.

An action by a state or 

non-state actor designed 

to mask or reshape the 

truth about an event.

Disinformation, of course, is everywhere. 

It’s all that bullshit about you being powerful. 

About companies that care.

About the investments they make to heal the planet.

It’s everything ever uttered by the cranial-merkin-wearing felon-in-chief and his persilschien willing-executioners. It’s every word you’ve heard about healthcare, taxes, elections and whatever number of wars we are or are not fighting.

But Disinformation has an equally pernicious döppleganger.

Dis-Information.

You might want to take a look at this to see what I mean. (It’s 2:06 long. And of course, you have no time.) It’s about the power of information—even if no one actually reads it.

As Sammy Glick asked in Budd Schulberg’s great novel “What Makes Sammy Run?” "Why tell the truth when you can lie?”

Why provide ballast when you can show generic pictures?

So 99.99% of advertising, of conversation, of intercourse is empty of meaning and promise. It’s lip service. Without the spurious pleasure of actual lips.

So we don’t create brands. We create un-meaning. Which destroys brands.

Then we pay for awards for it. And publicize the awards. All while creating more un-meaning.

Diff. Er. Ent.

Does work like this matter anymore?

Almost forty years ago, I developed a test. 

A test of people.

(As my daughters might say, I’m a judgey sonofa.)

Around that time, even though I was young, often clients and others would ask me if I would talk to their niece or nephew, or a friend of a cousin’s tennis coach, because they wanted to get a job in advertising.

When I started in 1993 or so teaching a course or two in advertising at the School of Visual Arts, I quickly realized something.

A lot of people want to go into advertising.

They think it’s easy.

They think it’s fun.

They think it’s rich.

They think ideas pop into your head and the next thing you know you’re off shooting with gorgeous actors in exotic locales.

And breakfast burritos.

At the School of Visual Arts I realized that if your class started with fifteen people, after four weeks it would be down to ten.

After three more weeks it would be down to seven.

At the end of the twelve or fifteen weeks, three kids would still be working hard on the assignment. Those three would eventually get jobs in the industry.

Even though it’s almost 35 years since then and a lot has changed, I’d imagine those ratios really haven’t.

The test I developed was blunt and binary.

I learned it from my father, actually. 

He was blunt and binary.

I’d ask wannabes a simple question.

When you go into a grocery store, do you get excited? 

That is do you like seeing product design and display?

Do you like seeing how products present themselves?

The monikers attached to them?

Do you like seeing them showing off like a musician during a guitar solo?

If you’re not excited by what we sell and how it’s sold and how others are doing it, I reason, you’re probably not right for the business. 

(Going to the A&P with my father was like watching a ballgame with Branch Rickey or a fashion-show with André Leon Talley. These people see a lot of these things. They zero-in on small specialness.)

My core belief is simple.

There’s a lot of sameness in the world.

In the grocery store.

In politicians. 

In products.

In agencies.

In people trying to break into the job.

I’ll put it very simply.

As simply as I can.

No one gets picked for blending in.

People, products, companies, politicians, butterflies on the wing get picked by standing out.

(Years ago, Steven Spielberg started filming the stories of Holocaust survivors telling their stories. Even these stories, full of emotion, horror, woe and triumph got boring after a while. Some of the world’s most powerful stories didn’t stand out because of their sameness.)

The biggest change I have noticed in advertising is that no longer do we have to have heated arguments about the color green versus yellow, or the word “but” versus “although,” today we argue over un-arguable things.

We actually argue over the need to differentiate.

Many people, maybe the majority, no longer believe you have to.

They have all sorts of plannery-ratiocinations why differentiating is no longer necessary.

I think this started in the early days of advertising and data. 

We somehow believed that our targeting would be so good we’d get our message to an eager buyer and it would be perfectly adroit and convincing. You’ve heard the hype. 

The right message to the right person at the right time. (That seldom happens even with the most ardent lovers. What are the chances it will happen with mayonnaise?)

Its mere arrival would lead to sales.

No idea was actually necessary.

That thinking spilled into direct marketing's adjunct, digital.

And from digital it went on to sully every other sphere.

What’s more, maybe the people in advertising today no longer actually go to the grocery store. 

They no longer make a decision about what they buy.

Or they no longer think about it.

About once-a-week someone over 50 calls me.

They’ve just lost their job.

They have a great site.

And won two lions at Cannes a couple years back.

“What makes you different,” I ask.

They funfer. That’s Yiddish for er-ing and um-ing and not answering.

Finally they ask indignantly, “what do you mean?”

“I mean everyone has a great book. Everyone’s won two lions. Everyone has great recommendations and something shot by Brian or Lance.

“What makes you different?”

Funfer.

What makes you different is from an ontological point of view about the world’s hardest question to answer. 

It’s what makes you you?

Or as they sang in The Chorus Line, “Who Am I Anyway? Am I My Resume?"

Most people prefer not to answer it.

So they meander from one shit-hole to the next.

Never more than a post-nasal-drip away from being again fired.

Because ‘what makes you different’ is hard.

Too hard for most people to bother with.

Here are some differences.

There’s not a soul alive who could convince me these ads would not work today.

But we’ll never know.

They’re different.

And different is too hard.