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Douglas Holt and James Twitchell

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from: James Twitchell

An English Teacher on Branding

Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2001, at 12:35 PM ET

Yo Doug,

After I didn't hear from you yesterday, I thought you might have overcaffeinated. Would I have a case against Starbucks? Loss of conversational rights?

No matter, I love the caffeine speed of this conversation. But I want to go slow here for a second because of something you said. Here it is: "marketers play with meanings to move product." I don't buy the "they pitch, we catch" interpretation. I think it's "they pitch, we catch; we toss it back, sometimes they miss." So I want to get your whatsup on what I take to be the current crock de jour from business schools--namely, books, articles, courses, seminars on ... branding.

I have been reading all these books on branding. I mean, they are endless.

So I'm going to give you my two cents. Are you ready?

An English teacher looks at branding:

1. A brand is a story told by producer and consumer about some object. It's a work of fiction rather like a nursery story. The kid/consumer says, "tell me a story," and the parent/producer says, "which one?" and the kid says, "the one about the wolf," and the parent says "OK, what do you want the wolf to do?" and the kid starts acting like the storyteller and says, "let's have the wolf have really big teeth ..." and, you get the point. Stories are never told by tellers alone; they are told by tellers and audiences.

2. Switching gears: The Industrial Revolution means most objects are machine-made and hence interchangeable. Your widget-making machine and mine make the same stuff, ergo the only difference resides in what we say about the widget; the difference resides in the story, in the brand. But brands long predate manufactured goods. They just got supercharged in the 19th century. Now they are all over the place.

3. Usually, in the modern world, the more similar the widget, the more fanciful the story. I mean that's the only way to generate distinction. So with a completely interchangeable product--say, bottled water--the brand--especially for the luxury supplier and consumer--will go over the top. Hence Evian. When I go to class in a few minutes, about half my class are gripping their water bottles. It's what they have for milk, for comfort, for story. And they'll separate themselves out by brand. Little consumption communities. Sharing stories. Well, in a way.

4. OK, the greatest brands are supershort stories. Ivory is pure. FedEx is overnight. Budweiser is the king of beers. Ronald Reagan knows. Harvard is for the supersmarties. As you can see, often this has nothing to do with truth. Forget truth. Brands are never about literal truth.

Brands in distress go bananas because the story is shown as fiction. Whoops! Did you see the Ford ad in this morning's New York Times and Wall Street Journal? The full-page jobbie with the Goodyear tires in your face. Quality is job No. 1, huh?

5. Now, here comes the school teacher nonsense. When the product is totally and completely fungible, totally interchangeable, then watch out! All kinds of great stories get generated. Here's a totally fungible product: the Mass of the Holy Roman Catholic Church during the Renaissance. It never changed. Always the same. The Vatican made sure. What happened? The surrounding stories became fantastic. Competing orders like the Jesuits, the Benedictines, and all the others upped the story line. And what was the story line? The literal church. The gothic church. It explodes. Ditto the stuff inside, the stuff we call art. If the Mass had been changeable, then the story would have been calmed down. They had to compete for audience. And they did so not by changing the service but by changing the story, the brand.

6. Wanna see the same phenomenon? Go to Las Vegas. Each of the casinos is exactly the same. By that I mean that the card games run by the same rules, the slot machines have the same computer chips, the roulette wheels are balanced by the same agency of the state. Are you with me? So the only way you can differentiate yourself is with what you put over the casino, the church towers, as it were. What you see in Vegas is a Darwinian struggle of stories. What story do you want? Ancient Egypt? Caesars Palace? Pirates? South Sea island? (Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi is a great book and one that changed my life.)

7. Tell me you are still with me because this is what I think is happening in Chicago. A story is being told, and you are resisting it. The Blues District, indeed. But that's not the point. It's the audience's desire to have the story.

Often we don't want things. We want stories. Sometimes we buy things to get the stories. BTW: I think that's part of what's going down in the display ads in the New York Times. They are telling just supersmall parts of powerful stories. Stories of redemption and meaning.

8. Let's go back to Vegas. What is the story most people currently want to hear in Vegas? Check out the Bellagio and the Venetian hotels. They are packed. What's the story? It's the story of Renaissance luxury. They want the story of--get this--art. These places are loaded with art. I mean loaded.

9. One final point, and then it's off to work I go. In the 1930s an Oxford don gave his graduate students a sheaf of poems. Some were by Shakespeare, some by lesser poets, some by Hallmark, some by himself. He told these advanced students: Now tell me which are the great works of art. If great art is self-evident, then they should have been able to make the distinctions, right? On intrinsic qualities. The couldn't do it. Know why? Because art is a brand, too. It's a story we tell about certain stuff.

10. It's a bit more complex than that, but I am now off to generate value for Brand Wordsworth. They need me, those little water carriers.

Hey, did I have too much Maxim, or what?

Best,

Jim

the breakfast table
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from: James Twitchell

An English Teacher on Branding

Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2001, at 12:35 PM ET
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James Twitchell is supposed to be teaching English literature but is more interested in the marketing of stuff. He has written books on advertising (Adcult USA, Twenty Ads That Shook the World) and has a mild defense of luxury consumption coming out next year (Living It Up: Why We Love Luxury). Douglas Holt is a professor at Harvard Business School.
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[Notes from the Fray Editor: Let's talk about coffee. Joseph Britt., below, was just one of many--follow the thread, and consider the question of tipping the barista. He still had time to discuss milk, here, too. And Brendan Herlihy took on ice-cream here. Neill Hamilton is looking for more "dissent, anger, blood feuds... I want the people writing in the Breakfast Table to open up life long vendettas" here (he always is, he's the Breakfast Table's official trouble-maker), but Richard Walrath enjoyed the banter: "it's almost like being there with the third cup of coffee."]


We're really talking about two different things here, aren't we? Coffee, and then all the froofy coffee-influenced liquid dessert-style beverages that take up most of the space on coffee house menus. I have nothing against the latter (because making fun of them is always a good time), but coffee is a really serious subject. If you're going to drink something nearly every day, it might as well be good. This is why I've never understood all the sneering condescension directed at Starbucks. Pre-Starbucks, most coffee served in public places was awful--you were ahead of the game if you ordered came out hot, caffeinated and with no taste at all. OK, most coffee served in public places is still awful, but with Starbucks you at least have the choice of having a good cup of coffee.

I confess I think Starbucks is slipping, based on extensive research I've done at the Minneapolis Airport. They used to offer a rotation of different coffees--Sumatra, Mocha Java, even New Guinea--but now seem to mostly serve up a couple of blends with names like "European" and "Christmas." Talk about your brand marketing. Also they routinely serve the coffee so hot you wonder if there is something wrong with the water they're using.

--Joseph Britt

(To reply, click here.)


 Maybe the students in Mr. Twitchell's anecdote couldn't tell good poetry from bad without guidance, but this doesn't strike me as being universally true. Poetry isn't my thing, but music is, and I have no trouble separating the good from the bad using only my own ears. If there wasn't something intrinsic in good art, we wouldn't, over time, have come to a general agreement about the relative worth of, say, Mozart vs. Salieri.

--Chloe Pajerek

(To reply, click here.)

 (5/30)

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