Lokomotive Breath

I moved this blog to Wordpress, this blog is now a new blog

This blog about the social life of brands is now at http://lokomotivebreath.wordpress.com. The reasons for this move are obvious. My posts grew longer, some into essay format, and Tumblr doesn’t offer any of the conveniences for the reader that we’re expecting from blogs that we use regularly.

This is nothig against Tumblr, I still like it and frankly am only now beginning to understand and use its real strength.

Therefore I repurpose this blog as my journal for noteworthy things found on the web and in real life. Which I hope is less of an abuse of the Tumblr blogging format and its readers.

Hope to see you here AND there.

To Hell with Flash!

Flash is the antithesis of all achievements of the web: transparency, dialogue, participation. A dinosaur of the internet-as-medium metaphor. And therefore, a dead man walking. The last proof I needed came with the new Deutsche Telekom sustainability campaign website (I commented on the campaign here).

Unintentional opacity comes with the pursuit of creative control that Flash promises. It’s not bad intent, just professional myopia on the side of marketing people who love the idea of creative control and still value it higher than … see first sentence. Things would change faster if we took the instrument out of their hands and mass-uninstalled our Flash players.

But unfortunately Flash is also the universal tool for embedding media and essential for many of the web’s most popular destinations like YouTube or Slideshare. It’s not without alternatives for this purpose (after all, you can watch YouTube on the iPhone that doesn’t support Flash), only the current standard. Which means Flash will be around for a while. But the facts that it is proprietary and also hugely oversized just for the media playing task mean that it’s destined to fade. Which is good for … (repeat refrain).

Mind your own dirt, please, Deutsche Telekom!

Deutsche Telekom has just launched an environmental image campaign (watch TV spot here) that’s debatable in several aspects.

Only the smallest slip is the campaign website at www.millionen-fangen-an.de. While the site puts Flash to a really beautiful use, a non-Flash version doesn’t even exist. Strange for the company that exclusively sells the iPhone here (which cannot play Flash). Plus, it makes sure that the substance and arguments behind the campaign are not accessible to friendly or unfriendly bloggers to link to. I don’t suspect any bad intent here, just the usual misunderstanding of the web as one-way channel on the side of marketing people. If I needed any more proof of that misunderstanding, it would be the complete lack of a back channel, in spite of all the trendy little Twitter, Facebook, de.licio.us and Digg icons; the sole purpose of which seems to turn me into a free ad carrier but God forsake not start a conversation. If this is an honest corporate endeavor, why do you dislodge it on a temporary landing page with a slogan domain name in the first place? Why do you deliberately make it smell like just a tactical image improvement plot driven by marketing and not backed by the company itself?

A bigger mistake is the campaign artwork that reduces people to model railway figures - the kind of toys that we are warned our toddlers could inhale -, which makes for an interesting look but doesn’t express a very polite attitude about the customer. The slogan which means “millions begin” can be (mis-?)read as further evidence of this attitude.

My big point of critique however is that they’re not talking about their dirt but mine. Not about what they do but what I should do. Firstly, I’m supposed to opt for online invoices to help save millions of pages of paper. I’d say that the environmental effect is at least debatable when millions of consumers switch to home printing (because they need the printout for the tax office, or just for their private book-keeping - it’s what people do). On the other hand, the cost savings are all on the side of the company, and they’re in the nine-digit scale. Next, I should download my music instead of buying CDs to save plastic, energy and CO2. I should return my old mobiles for recycling and I should also get a new DECT phone from DT because it consumes less power than previous generations. I should, I should, I should … what about you, Deutsche Telekom? Oh, you’re the ‘enabler’ of all that environmental friendliness of mine, I see.

If you dive into the Flash adorned substance of Deutsche Telekom’s so-called ‘Sustainability Initiative’, it gets pretty thin. Bottomline, there’s not much more to it than the understandable intentions of saving on invoicing costs and selling new hardware. The policy of taking back old handsets has been industry practice for years and doesn’t count for a ‘differentiator’.

To make the bucket look less empty, they’ve thrown in a few only loosely related topics like web-safety for children (supported by a 2 years old test award for their filtering software) or social audited supplier management.

Adding everything up, what is the net value of this campaign? The topic is too serious to add colour to the pale face of a telco giant. It could add credibility and responsibility and thereby build trust, but a lot of that has been lost in the execution as a superficial image campaign. And it could have done a lot to build relationships with concerned consumers - if response were welcome, or at least possible in any way.

What Deutsche Telekom customers would value even more than a sustainability initiative, however, will have to wait a little longer. A company that many of its customers perceive as a Darth Vader of service industries could benefit much more from an initiative centered around LISTENING.

In the meantime, what would they pay me for not using that Twitter button? UPDATE: They didn’t, and I did.

The Case for Brand Socialism

The term seems to go back to Reg Lascaris, founding partner of TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris\SouthAfrica. However, since the link to his original 2006 blog post is no longer active, I can only tell by second-hand quotes from Dave Duarte and Mike Davison at 1000heads.com what the originator was refering to. From those sources it seem as though Lascaris was referring to the new power that Web 2.0 is playing into the hands of consumers, but particularly the geeks among them, to influence the fate brands.

I honestly can‘t remember whether I came across the original post or one of his mentioners back in 06 or whether this is a case of parallel minds. But in any case, I use the term in a broader sense because I believe that more trajectories than the impact of internet are heading into that direction.

The first time I dropped the phrase was in a presentation I gave to an audience of web insiders in earlier 2009, earning me a big solid question mark that suddenly filled the room. Later at the bar, however, quite a number of sympathizers dropped their pants. Sure, the idea fits in with the crisis-induced debates about how capitalism can be tamed and humanized. But if it look today like I‘m trying to ride a wave of popularity, may I say to my excuse that my musings go far back before the Lehman crash. Because trends had been moving in the general direction for quite some time now, some of them for many years. (See for instance the original Cluetrain Manifesto, theses #7, 13, 50, 65, or 69.)

At first, it is important to say that this is happening without a revolution (at least not in the historian‘s sense). Brand Socialism is not about the actual redistribution of ownership. No violence, no expropriation - you may now exhale. The premise is rather that, when brands are the dominant source of surplus value, ownership does no longer mean very much. The true authority over a brand is distributed across a widening circle of people and parties: customers; employees; investors and lenders; distributors; suppliers; partners.

Sure, the most obvious factor behind this development is the internet, which facilitates communiation and networking with and within that wide circle. Another factor is a post-authoritarian shift reflecting our growing distrust that individuals, however gifted, are superior to our collective wisdom better at mastering the challenges of our times. And it is again the internet that enables us to syndicate our wisdom and to organize collective processes without the need for leadership.

What does this mean for brands? For the time being, I have little more than a collection of stickernotes. These are my observations and thoughts about how and why brands are becoming collective assets. The list is far from complete and only losely organized. But it should suffice to prove the point and the urgency of adapting our brand management organizations and processes:

• Customers, employees, developers and investors flock around the same big idea. Forget about treating them as different target audiences. Forget about feeding them completely different streams of communication. They are now one community that is, if not yet fully networked and organized, increasingly aware of and cross-linked with each others. Which will soon give them the power to deal fatal blows against a brand, its company or its management.

• Whether or not their brand has a big idea, and what it is, is no longer for a bunch of top rankers in a remote HQ to decide. The infinite research-plan-implement loop, feeding multi million Euro service industries today, can and must be short-circuited. Now the customer wants to speak with the brand directly, not with an uninvolved focus group moderator with a psychology degree. And brands better listen to him, or else …

• Brands, and the organizations behind them, can‘t be managed top-down. Brands only have a life in front of the customer. So it‘s effectively the frontline staff that manages the brand. Top-down management becomes more and more of an illusion. We live in the times of ,post-heroic management‘ (Dirk Baecker). And Steve Jobs may well be the last poster boy of the previous paradigm. Our corporate reality is not heroic leadership but delegation to experts and committes. Now that we‘ve learned to manage brands through committees, it‘s actually a short step to represent the real experts on our boards.

And a few even less organized associations that follow from these points:

• A brand‘s access to fresh capital might soon be directly correlated to it‘s accessibility for customers.
• Listen is a really BIG word for a large organization. It means new infrastructure, and re-orgs. Forget about handling it with a newer, bigger CRM system. It would be easier and better to turn every employee within the company into an access point from outside. Not a service rep in the traditional sense; maybe just a care-taker who can find someone who knows about; maybe just 2 days every month …
• Top-down management is as likely as your CEO can measure up to Steve Jobs.
• We wish him a very long life, but one day someone will have to take over from Steve Jobs. Question to the share- and stake-holders: would you rather have another monomaniac trying to bend the Apple brand around his own ego; or a committee of long-time employees and collaborative power-users? Writing it, both sound equally unattractive and the question too black and white. Have to make a note to look into the grey zone later …
• Bottom-up management is a new paradigm. Do we have the tools and skills? Are there examples? How about DER SPIEGEL, the German news magazine. Back in 1974, founder Rudolf Augstein shared his ownership with his employees in a 50/50 constellation. What looks like a recipe for permanent stalemate has turned out to be the single most successful model in the German publishing industry.