Branding is just like life: How to make it over the wall
When you do brand strategy consulting, seeing bad branding hurts just a little bit more. You have more empathy for how people deal with the visual and verbal assault they are under all day and all night. The first line of defense people have is to put up a wall and hide.
People put up walls to protect themselves. Against people they don’t like, things they’re afraid of, stuff they don’t want to hear about. Screening your calls—that’s a wall. Not watching the news—that’s a wall. Not saying hello to people—that’s a wall. A wall is a way of saying “enough!!*%*#—I don’t want you in my life, I don’t need you in my life. I don’t even know who you are.” Sometimes this behavior is self-defeating but generally people are prepared to pay the price.
People put up walls to protect themselves from companies, too. Any company that puts an insert in my New Yorker, you’re dead. The first thing I do is rip out all the inserts. I do have to admit that one of them made it over the wall last night. It was an insert for Marc Maron’s new show on IFC that caught my eye as I was giving it the heave ho. I read the entire thing, but only because I’m a big fan of his interviews. So even when people put up a high wall, there is hope for companies.
There was a time when this wasn’t necessary. In the old, old days, when a peddler arrived at your door with pots and pans and combs and mirrors, there was no need for a wall. He might have been the only person you saw that week. He was both the program and the commercials. But these days we need pretty high walls. There are so many incoming messages that we need a way to control the volume. Fewer and fewer people are watching old fashioned television where they pour the commercials right into your head. When you watch a show on your computer or with the help of a DVR, the odds shift a little in your favor.
Good show, awful branding. Except the other night I was watching Mad Men on Comcast On Demand and they actually tried to force me to watch the commercials. I was incensed, but they actually had me watching the stupid commercials where they use the characters from the show to sell you Lincolns–a very unclassy technique on a very classy show. But AMC comes on like a bunch of carnival hustlers, so that is not surprising. Good show, bad branding, awful on-air promotion.
Are your favorite brands guilty of this? You and I could teach these people how to make it over the wall, but why should we give away our secrets? You don’t have to do brand strategy consulting to figure out what’s going on. The more they know about us, the harder they try to find new ways to influence our behavior. Now when I buy gas at the Shell station down the street, they make me push an extra button to tell them I am not even vaguely interested in getting Safeway reward points when I buy gas. They make me push the button every time, like they are hoping that I will miss a beat and say YES when I always tell them NO.
This is part of a series called Branding is Just Like Life. This admirable exercise in restraint was brought to you by A Hundred Monkeys. We build ladders to help you make it over the wall.
