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.