Chrysler, Detroit, and American Dreaming

Truly great marketing communications must be simple, easy to understand, and evocative.  They must provide a clean, simple articulation of extremely big ideas: they need to reflect where a brand has been, where it is going, and must acknowledge all the impressions people have about the brand. The product isn’t the only thing a brand represents: Rice Krispies are so much more than just breakfast cereal, aren’t they?

I am legitimately awestruck by Chrysler’s new positioning: “Imported from Detroit”.  With three simple words, Portland-based Wieden + Kennedy have evoked the history and legacy of the American automotive industry, and even America itself.  They acknowledge the power that imported vehicles now have on the auto industry, but remind us that America is a big country - Detroit may as well be on the other side of the world from Texas, California or Oregon. Detroit is positioned as a nation unto itself - for better or worse – and it kind of is if you think about it.

Furthermore, the folklore of Detroit is wrapped into a modern, relevant package by engaging a Detroit-based spokesperson in Eminem. This is a man who, if nothing else, is one of the most credible, respected people in American entertainment. He has also had his own ups-and-downs before coming back on top. He brings authenticity, immediacy and legitimacy to Chrysler’s born-in-Detroit positioning. They couldn’t have done better if Sinatra came back to life – and had been from Detroit in the first place (and never left).

Detroit has famously been in decline for decades, but if there’s one thing America loves, it is an underdog story. What greater underdog is there than Detroit, this faded colossus in American mythology? Chrysler has laid claim to one of the most significant anchors in the evolution of the American dream – the Motor City – with all of the baggage, dreams, fortunes, and tragedies that go along with that. It seems risky, but I don’t think it is: if Detroit is positioned as a rising Phoenix, then Chrysler will also catch fire and burn brightly.

America loves positive stories of National pride, and this positioning taps into a deep well of American passion: “it's the hottest fires that make the hardest steel.”  It is genius in its simplicity – the same kind of sharp understanding of human nature that built the Motor City in the first place.

I bet the folks at Ford are kicking themselves (or are undertaking an agency review). The most simple, effective marketing solutions often remain the most difficult to articulate, but Wieden + Kennedy nailed this one for Chrysler with evocative, effective positioning.

Footnote: Wieden + Kennedy are the folks behind my other favourite brand re-positioning of last year, the now-legendary Old Spice campaign, which also turned an old-and-tired brand with significant baggage (Eddie Murphy’s ‘Delirious’, anyone?) into a new-and-vibrant brand again. If Wieden + Kennedy folks are reading, and want to open a Canadian office, we need to talk….

Heeding My Own Advice

I fell victim to a common mistake, and it took me two years to notice. I was so busy helping other people that I forgot to heed my own advice.

I have spent the past two years recommending strategic, integrated communications – best practises to spread a unified message across multiple available platforms. As an illustration, I recommend that if you publish a newsletter, you should break the individual articles apart and repurpose them as blog posts. Those blog posts can be automatically fed to Facebook and Twitter accounts (if it’s appropriate for your brand). This can help to drive traffic to your website, and the circle can be completed by allowing easy access to your social media sites by providing quick links on your website.

I missed this last part.

The simple act of inserting clickable social media icons on my own website has eluded me until this week. The new-and-improved Sociable Communications website now includes direct links to the social media accounts I have been populating for years. This not only offers more communications functionality, but I think it looks better too. I consciously went for a minimalist design on my site, but the added splash of colour works for me.

It’s a common mistake to overlook the simple things in life and in business, even if they are elements that you recommend to others each day. Still, it’s a reminder that we all need to spend a bit of time and attention re-examining our own daily approach to the way we present ourselves and our business. You can always find a way to improve things and evolve your processes for the better.

I always liked a quote from The Shawshank Redemption:  “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” My interpretation of the line is that it’s always in your best interest to seek self-improvement and growth. The challenge is that with a bit of ambition, you are often looking for the forest and the trees, forgetting to prune the bushes at your feet. It’s sometimes hard to see what’s right in front of you. We all need to stop and look down, even when we are running ahead.

Volunteer Commitments are Professional Commitments

A well-rounded professional career can benefit greatly from the experience, connections and mutual value that volunteer commitments can provide. However, your primary focus should be on providing value to your chosen community: you provide no value whatsoever in your volunteer role unless you are fully engaged and fully committed.

This applies to any committees you may choose to join, and it particularly applies to Board positions. For all intents and purposes, Board roles (including voluntary Board positions) mean that you and your Board colleagues oversee other people’s careers, expectations, goals and lives. As such, you are honour-bound to step up and do your absolute best. The root of any Board position is that it should never be “about you”.


If the commitment feels like a duty rather than a privilege, then please do your final duty and source an engaged individual who can fill your chair – and then get out of the way.

So many people join Boards for the wrong reasons: they are fulfilling employer expectations, or worse, they are padding their resume. If you are one of these people, do us all a favour and quit your position RIGHT NOW. You may not respect the magnitude of your Board position, but the staff of your organization certainly do, and you owe it to them (to say nothing of all other stakeholders in your organization) to give your volunteer role everything that you can give.


If you can’t, then please get out of the way of everyone else’s progress.

Your Work vs. the Reasons Why You Work

It can be a strange thing for a business owner or manager to present themselves on behalf of their company - where should the lines between a professional profile and a personal profile be drawn? It comes down to the level of comfort you have with "being your brand". If you own a store on Main Street, then you probably should "be your brand" - your friends will also be your customers (or should be), and your customers should become your friends. In person-to-person transactions, the best way to build repeat business is to build "sociability" into each professional transaction.

However, if you are selling "professional services", then you may not want personal details associated with your work life. Do you really want to know about your Doctor's weekend habits? Do you want your clients to know about yours? It's a tough call.

I personally couldn't care less what people know about me, but I still try to keep some distance between my personal and professional lives. At the end of the day, my clients are extremely important to me, and I count many as great friends, but other things are equally (or more) important than business stuff, and I choose to try to keep things partitioned - if only to remind myself when it is time to stop working. That's a big one - and it is a tough line to draw in the sand.

I spend a lot of my time talking with people about strategy, but it is important to have a life-strategy too - and that strategy should start with knowing where to draw the line between work and the reasons why you work.

Sociable Communications’ Favourite Viral Advertising 2010

One of the key criteria of any ad campaign is the number of views any ad receives – literally the quantity of pairs-of-eyeballs any ad receives. As such, viral advertising should be judged for its quality for sure, but viewer quantity is also a key criteria. As such, I present my favourite viral video advertisements for 2010, with my humble commentary.

Old Spice – The Man Your Man Could Smell Like

This is (and will always likely be) legendary. It added “I’m on a Horse” to the lexicon. I laughed my ass off to everything the Old Spice guy did (including the brilliant ‘Twitter Responses’ campaign). And more to the point, I personally purchased Old Spice deodorant for the first time ever – I never would have considered doing so without this ad, and that call-to-action made the difference. I appreciate the Axe ads, but they weren’t for me – the Old Spice ads did hit the target though – until I ran out of Old Spice, and went back to my old habits. They may want to address that…



Arcade Fire – The Wilderness Downtown (Featuring “We Used to Wait”)

This is a game-changer in the world of music marketing and promotion – and a stunning example of how free web tools can be manipulated and embraced to create new (and shockingly personalized) works of art. And, the “video” is so damned good that you almost don’t notice how great the song is until your second pass through the “video” process (and let’s face it, didn’t everyone try it a few times??).

http://thewildernessdowntown.com/

Toyota – Swagger Wagon

Maybe it’s just the place I’m at in my life, but this ad blew my mind. There’s a whole series of viral ads with these characters, and I kind of want to hang out with these folks. This honestly makes me want to buy one of these vans, if only to support a company that could be this funny and cool.



Also, “Dare to dream – you could be this!!”



Transport Accident Commission, Victoria, Australia – Twenty Year Retrospective

The TAC in Victoria, Australia has been making deeply impactful conventional (as it were) television ads for twenty years. The Aussies don’t screw around with metaphors like us North Americans – they go for the throat, and get proven results with significantly reduced fatalities from drunk driving. This ad went global on the internet, and may hopefully make a global difference in the same way TAC’s television ads have had in Australia.



Axe – Clean Your Balls

From the divine to the inane… OK, this ad is a bit easy, but what the hell – an ad like this is designed for a viral space, and a brand like Axe is the one to do it with. Check out the long close-up on the golf balls – the tension is palpable. This kind of writing and direction takes some thought, and a bit of courage from the advertiser’s point-of-view. “Cleans right through the prickly surface”. Funny, well-cast, and smart (in spite of the over-the-top stupidity of the concept).



Adidas – Star Wars Cantina

Yeah, what can you say – awesome digital effects, funny, relevant celebrities, and Star Wars. Nerd heaven. Jedi Snoop-Dogg, David Beckham and Jay Baruchel (in particular) are genius. Baruchel sniffing the blaster is perfect – wouldn’t you do the same if you could?



Nike – Write the Future

This puts the aspirations of anyone who as even played a sport into a global context, and allows everyone to dream big, alongside their sports heroes. Ergo, if you wear Nike shoes, you can live your dream. Or something like that.



Tipp-Ex White and Rewrite – NSFW - A Hunter Shoots a Bear

This was a first – something I hadn’t seen before on YouTube, let alone in advertising, online or otherwise. The first time I saw it, I was legitimately surprised, and then delighted. I was even led to wonder about the technology itself, though I suspect YouTube was instrumental is adjusting their interface to allow this to work. It also had people trying new variations over and over – I bet the average viewing time was close to ten minutes – unbelievable for any advertisement. I just wonder how much it translated into purchase – I’ve never heard of (or seen) the product, and I almost worry that their product distribution didn’t match their impact. Still, the sheer depth of thought they put into this execution is stunning.

Independent Resurgence and the Demise of the Mainstream

I always look to trends in music as indicators of shifting consumer patterns.  Music is a great bellwether for predicting significant shifts in popular culture.

Rock ‘n’ Roll overthrew swing bands in the early 50s, bringing a whole new wave of fashion and culture.  Then, in 1964, America turned to the Beatles as those pop culture heroes from the 50s became increasingly faded, bloated and over-produced.

In the mid-Seventies, punk and hip hop raised a street-level middle-finger to the faded, increasingly bloated music of the time – disco, prog rock, and stadium rock.

In the early 90s, grunge and “mainstream independent” music was a response to the fading, bloated excess of the mid-80s hair-and-fashion-based music of the time.

Of course, like all trends, each of these revolutions were co-opted and commercialized by the mainstream.  The Beatles begat the Monkees.  The Sex Pistols begat Adam and the Ants.  Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five begat MC Hammer.  Hell, you could say that Nirvana begat Limp Bizkit.

However, Nirvana’s Nevermind (which I will use as a revolutionary benchmark) was released in 1991, and nothing has shook the ground that hard since. Toronto’s “New Music” radio station still rotates Nirvana and early Pearl Jam (to say nothing of early Tragically Hip) more than any other music, in spite of the fact that the latter two have a deep well of great (and more current) ‘new music’.

I think we are overdue for a revolution.

The problem is that consumer consumption habits have changed significantly over the past decade.  According to my prior examples, a “revolution” should come along about every fourteen years or so.  By that math, 2005 should have been the tipping point – but by that time, music downloads were rampant.  The recording industry was reeling.  And more significantly, people weren’t buying actual recordings (in the traditional, physical sense).  If people were buying music, they were downloading MP3s (which are a significant step back in terms of audio quality compared to 24-bit CDs).  MTV and Much Music didn’t play music anymore.  Clubs and bars didn’t host original live music anymore (at least in Canada, compared to the live music explosion of 1990 – 1995).

Since 2005, our mainstream pop culture touchstones increasingly rest with television – and not “music television”.  Canadian/American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, and auto-tuned vocals are the new normal.  If a revolution was ever due, the time is now.

So where are the revolutionaries?

The revolution is already here.  There are songwriters telling better stories that ever.  There are bands with more edge than ever.  There are bands with less edge – though intentionally so, to great emotional effect.  And, there are bands that are finding new and innovative means of reaching a new audience.  The difference is that these musicians aren’t enormous “stars” – they are simply career musicians, period.

My point is that some revolutions are coup d’états, while others happen gradually - slowly, until everything has changed and nobody is the wiser, and everyone is generally better off.  These are the revolutions of the end-user.  In commerce, like in politics, the majority (and end-user demand) usually has a way of ruling things sooner or later.

The “digital revolution” may have thrown off old patterns of creative revolution, but it hasn’t fundamentally damaged the artistic world – it has just necessitated some innovation.  At worst, it has defined niches that are supported by the fact that artists have potential access to a global market, rather than a local market: artists may not need to water-down their vision in order to pay bills.  Great art is, by nature, often polarizing – but if a potential audience is global rather than local, then you can “polarize away”, secure in the knowledge that those who like your work will be equally as large a group as those who don’t like it.  You can comfortably ignore the naysayers, because the fans are potentially greater than you ever could have found through conventional means.

This new revolution is about distribution.  The old musical revolutions were still supported by a major-label economic structure that helped to motivate the masses.  Now, artists can motivate their audience themselves, with a bit of excellent creative work, and some creative self-marketing.

The new revolution is not about mass-consumer choices, but creative freedom, distribution opportunities, and economic reward.  The same goes for any brand marketing – businesses large and small can focus on their target and/or niche better now than they ever could before.  The classic “Four Ps of Marketing” include placement – which means product distribution and availability to the consumer.  Businesses, like musicians and artists, can now also communicate with a closely-targeted market with efficiency and effectiveness, and they can gain the economic benefit that flows from that level of focus.

Frequency and Relevancy – The Sociable Rules of Content Generation

If you review a few dates on this blog, you will see that I have broken a rule I so often espouse: when blogging, set a goal for frequency of posting, and stick to it. The problem is that I also recommend relevancy with every post: thought leadership can’t be established without relevant content. If your blogs, tweets or status updates aren’t directly relevant to your target audience, then it is better to say nothing. So, I’ve been saying nothing.

That’s not to say I’m not busy - but I won’t post information about my work on behalf of clients (my rule #4 of social media engagement is to respect privacy). The bottom line is that there are few rules with social media engagement, but if you are doing it at all, you need to set some goals and stick to them - so I'm providing a few "rules" of my own. My goals were sidetracked by my Rule #10 – until a client called me on my lack of posting frequency. Point taken – a client’s confidence was shaken in my ability, and it all comes back to revenue generation.

Since one of my unspoken rules of content generation is that blogs don’t need to be essays:

Sociable Communications’ Select Rules of Content Generation:

1. If you don’t have anything relevant to say, say nothing.

2. Know the ‘Who’ - who you are talking to.

3. Know the ‘Why’ - know your goals. Are you in it to build thought leadership? Drive sales? Brag?

4. Re-purpose existing content – if it’s worth saying in one place, say it in every place.

5. Respect privacy, and always give credit where credit is due.

6. Follow your company’s Code of Business Conduct and all other Company policies. If you don’t have any policies, write them and keep records of content generation.

7. Remember that your local posts can have global significance – and know that the Internet is permanent. When in doubt, do not post.

8. You don’t hold all of the keys – share your blogging opportunities with other staff. They have valuable insights too.

9. Do not say anything that could be perceived as confrontational, arrogant, libellous, unprofessional or slanderous – unless that is your goal.

10. If content generation isn’t generating revenue somehow, they why bother doing it?

My favourite is the last one. We are all too busy to do things that don’t add value. If you are participating in social media engagement, then always add value – if other people find your information valuable, then they will feed value back to you. At least, that is my goal.